De-Fragging

VEGAS · Post by **VEGAS** » 26 Apr 2007, 19:07

Hi all,

thinking of defragging my drives as its been a while since I last did it and lord knows what garbage has accumilated on the drives since buying the PC last year.

Basically my laptop is split into three drives C: D: and E:

I have all my documents and windows files on C: drive and all the flightsim files on D: drive. The E: is virtually empty and is basically used for anything spare or back up files.

Is the window de-fragger any good? Or is it best to purchase a quality defragger. I know certain performance criteria relate to defrag issues and I have heard someone suggest the Windows offering is not up to much.

Having defragged using windows previously it often leaves many fragmented files in place without doing anything to them so I'm tempted to either buy one or even better could anyone recommend a freeware offering?

Thanks in advance

Post by **TSR2** » 26 Apr 2007, 19:17

Hi Vegas.

If your running XP or later the opperating system trys to limit the amount of fragmentation on a disk by writing data to the disk in such a way that this is minimised.

The Windows defraggers are fine, and buying a 3rd party one is a complete waste of money as the preformance difference (if indeed there is any) between windows and 3rd untilities for this is neglegable. In fact many of the current untility packages actually use the microsoft untilies at a command line level behind a fancy GUI.

My advice would be to save your cash.

VEGAS · Post by **VEGAS** » 26 Apr 2007, 21:20

Hi Ben,

thanks for the reply. Interesting stuff. Perhaps your right, I might just do that. :think:

ATB

DanKH · Post by **DanKH** » 27 Apr 2007, 07:44

DiskKeeper

Sl4yer · Post by **Sl4yer** » 27 Apr 2007, 08:21

I've used UltimateDefrag from Disktrix (Available here) following recommendations on the Horizon forum. It's available on a 14-day free trial, and gives a graphical representation of the disk. You can place certain files or folders at the start of the disk for faster loading, and move archives and documents to the end. I can't claim to have noticed a massive difference, but my drives aren't particularly full.

Saying that, you won't notice much improvement in speed from repositioning since you (I assume) have one drive split into 3 partitions, so rejoining the files with the XP defragger might be just as good an option.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but defragging scares me. It's like I'm almost EXPECTING a hard drive to fail! I would recommend a good backup of important documents first (but, we all do that on a regular basis anyway, don't we? :think: ).

James

ianhind · Post by **ianhind** » 27 Apr 2007, 09:32

The commercial ones come with pretty graphics so that you can watch the coloured squares being moved around.

Therapeutic but not convinced it speeds anything up

nigelb · Post by **nigelb** » 27 Apr 2007, 09:56

For a freeware alternative you might want to try Power Defragmenter.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Har ... nter.shtml

or search Google for other download sites.

Not very a very fancy GUI, but it does the job. If you go to the site noted above, read the Softpedia Editor's review. A program called "Contig.exe" is required, but that was included in the the download package at that site.

The whole package is under a 500k download.

Quixoticish · Post by **Quixoticish** » 27 Apr 2007, 10:50

Getting a new piece of defragmentation software is just good PC practice; the windows defragmentation tool is completely useless and I'd recommend picking up a third party one immediately. Ultimate Defrag from Disktrix gets my recommendation (http://www.disktrix.com/). You can use it to sort out your most used files and folders to the rim of the hard drive platter next to the MFT and then follow that with all of your other files and folders, so the inward areas of the platter are reserved for empty space. This means far less disk access and I have noticed a huge improvment on games that have a lot of loading and hitching (MMORPG's improved an awful lot and benchmarking was 10% faster for my hard drive). Most importantly since the hard drive head has to move far less distance when accessing data you can extend the life of your hard drive by a fair bit because the head isn't whizzing backwards and forwards all the time to read from your MFT and files. It's worth every penny for this alone and this is the main reason to invest in a decent piece of defragmentation software. Drives are getting larger, internet connections faster and the amount of data read from and written to our drives is increasing tremendously, the poor things are working harder that was ever envisioned.

Be warned, if you've got a large hard drive it can take upwards of 24 hours to perform your first defragmentation, and any after that can be simple "maintenence" defragmentations that don't take very long at all.

Post by **DaveB** » 27 Apr 2007, 11:43

This is one area where 'my' good pc practice goes out of the window. Back in the dark days of Win3.0/3.11 e t c.. defrags were recommended on a regular basis but as the OS's have got more complex, I've found the requirement to derag negligable. Keep a HD full of rubbish for over 2years.. hit the defrag button and 99 times out of 100, windows will report that defragging is not required (this under XP).

On the assumption that Windows has a rough idea of what it's doing.. who am I to argue

For this reason, I don't defrag anymore.. just got out of the habit

ATB

DaveB :tab:

petermcleland · Post by **petermcleland** » 27 Apr 2007, 11:50

DanKH wrote:DiskKeeper

Agreed,

Definitely, I defrag my whole system at least once a day and it only takes seconds.

As for those who say that XP looks after things, you want to try a full defrag and THEN install FSX...Now look at the state of your drives! Now see how long it takes to put that right! Naturally, if you attempt to use FSX with the drives in that state then you will have a very poor performance indeed.

I'm just going to defrag my four drives now and time it...O.K. it was 1 minute and 18 seconds and that is 223 GBs Total Size...Not a problem!...I will sometimes defrag more that once a day if I have installed something

I use Diskeeper 2007 Professional.