Defragmenter

[aaaaa]

How often do you defrag your computer and how long does it take, or dont you bother?

thanks
aa

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

aaaaa,

It all comes down to how many times you install and uninstall programs or how often you download large files from the Internet and then delete them. (If you do not do so often, you can go months without Defraging.)

Now the time it takes to Defrag depends on the speed of your comp, the size of the Hard Drive, and the amount of Data on it.

Personally I do not Defrag, unless I am about to benchmark my Drives. WinXP does a really good job of Disk Management and unless you see an issue where each time you run a program, the Hard Drive runs a long time, I would not worry about it.

Now if you wanted to be really disciplined, then once a week or once a month would more than adequate.

If you Defrag regularly it will take less time per Defrag then if you go for long periods without Defragging. You could always leave the Drive Defragging over night and by morning you would be ready to go when you get up. :ok:

Take Care,

Richard

[Evo]

I'd agree with Richard. It's worth doing occasionally, especially if the drive is nearly maxed out, but it's nothing to worry about.

I have seen NTFS get itself into a huge mess on one XP PC, where a drive was used for a long time with only 100 - 200 Mb left. Lots of downloading, installing and deleting to clear up a few hundred megs for the next install. The Windows swap file was also dynamically sized on that drive, so it was continually looking for and releasing space. Eventually swap file performance slowed to a snail's pace, and the defragger couldn't clear up the mess so we ended up doing a format and reinstall.

That's a bit of an extreme example though :)

[Loose rivets]

I have always been surprised that windows didn't quickly obviate the need for de-fragging. Are the later systems technically different to the DOS-like file system?

What is the thinking of partitioning logical drives these days. I always do, but friends do not. It seems so much easier to manage the drive this way.

[Evo]

OK, I'm no expert and I may have got my memory twisted, but IIRC...

NTFS is much smarter than FAT32 and fragments much less, but it's not perfect. In particular, it was optimized for write speed - get the data down on disk, don't try too hard to manage it - with the hope that disk caching would make up for reads. For reasons I forget, this was a good idea given the hardware that was around when NTFS was rolled out and a not-so-good idea now. Saying that, on modern hardware NTFS is fine on all but the fullest disk, unless you're really doing IO-intensive work.

UNIX systems were, I believe, generally optimised for higher-end hardware and the server role of sending out data to multiple users, so you're reading more than writing and high-speed reads are more important than writes. Therefore all your data needs to be contiguous, and they would do things like pre-allocation of empty space for files to grow into and read-aheads to fill the disk cache with data that might be needed (doesn't work so well if you're doing lots of disk seeks to find the next bit of data, so it's important that files stay unfragmented) . They will fragment on a full disk, any filesystem will, but suffer less from it than NTFS does on disks with lots of free space.

[Ausatco]

Diskkeeper from Executive Software (http://www.executive.com) is much, much faster than the defragger in XP, and configurable.

They had a free Lite version at Version 7, but I think it's been discontinued. You might find it in a search. Well worth trying. When installed it replaces the native XP defragger, and when uninstalled the XP prog returns as default.

AA

[miss_heard]

I personally don't bother defragging anymore, and instead I usually perform a clean install of XP every 6-9 months. This normally makes me feel like I've just 'upgraded' my PC as everything runs a tad faster than before!

[Pindi]

Windows XP will actually tell you whether you need to defrag or not. Go into 'Defrag', click on the 'Analyse' button and you will find this advice.

[Mac the Knife]

NTFS fragments nearly as much as FAT but it's not such a big deal.

Being lazy I've set up a cronjob (Scheduled Task to you) that defrags each partition once a month. Curious that people don't use cronjobs more - it's a very good way of automating all sorts of housekeeping chores - but then I s'pose few modern Windows users are familiar with even a primitive scripting language like batch files, let alone perl or python.

Defrag: Command Line Parameters and Explanations
Usage: defrag volume [-a] [-f][-v] [-?]

Parameters

volume
The drive letter or a mount point of the volume to be defragmented
-a
Analyze only
-f
Forces defragmentation of the volume regardless of whether it needs to be defragmented or even if free space is low
-v
Verbose output
-?
Display the help text

Note: The volume must have at least 15 percent free space for Defrag to completely and adequately defragment it. Defrag uses this space as a sorting area for file fragments. If a volume has less than 15 percent free space, Defrag only partially defragments it.

"I find the command "cat /dev/null > foo" a lot more spiritual, it's like Death coming for your soul."