Do you defrag?

[kalniel]

Just as an aside, does anyone know if the inbuilt Win7 defrag is any better than that in XP & Vista?

It's much better than the XP one, yes - WAY faster, more effective. Don't know about vista.

[CaptainCrash]

I think the benefits of defragging are much overrated these days, and I do it rarely - maybe once every three or four months on the system partition when I'm having a cleanup, less often on data drives. Fragmentation is a fact of life with NTFS, but Vista & Win7 seem to have an decent amount of intrinsic ability to keep it within manageable levels, as long as they have a reasonable amount of free space to play with (that's even without the inbuilt defragger running on a schedule). Unless the disk is nearly full, it doesn't seem to reach the stage where it noticeably impacts performance.

I'm not saying don't ever defrag (there may be some particular usage patterns that require it more than others), but people sometimes seem to get neurotic about keeping all those little coloured blocks contiguous at all times, which seems a waste of effort IMHO as well as being an exercise in futility.

I certainly wouldn't spend any money on a third-party defragging app - I've yet to see any evidence that they make a measurable improvement to system performance over and above the Windows inbuilt tools.

[this_is_gav]

Used to do it regularly. Then just stopped as I never noticed any difference, so it just ended up as a waste of time.

Now I'll do one a month or so into a fresh install, and that'll be it until I wipe the OS.

[Funkstar]

I haven't done a defrag on my own systems for aaagggeeesss.

None of my volumes get that full, and it's my understanding that fragmentation is only a real problem when disks get full these days.

I'll be happy to be proved wrong

[nightkhaos]

I haven't done a defrag on my own systems for aaagggeeesss.

None of my volumes get that full, and it's my understanding that fragmentation is only a real problem when disks get full these days.

I'll be happy to be proved wrong

Fragmentation actually occurs most frequenty when handling large files. Generally speaking, the drive will fill up when handling lots of different sized files, particularly large ones...

Take the following example, you have a 1GB file on the end of the drive, and quickly create a text file of some kind, that takes up one or two sectors, which will be placed after the data for the 1GB file. You then delete the 1GB file and write a 4GB file from some source. Now unless the data for the one or two sector text file is moved, the space where the 1GB file was cannot be reclaimed by the 4GB file unless it is fragmented. This isn't a problem with this very simplifed problem, but if this is done a couple of hundred times, then there may not be a 4GB continious block, and thus, fragmentation.

[Will404]

I do it every few months, just use CMD tho, its far easier.

[CaptainCrash]

Fragmentation actually occurs most frequenty when handling large files. Generally speaking, the drive will fill up when handling lots of different sized files, particularly large ones...

I think no-one's questioning that fragmentation occurs - the point is, unless it measurably affects system performance, it doesn't really matter.

[dangel]

It's much better than the XP one, yes - WAY faster, more effective. Don't know about vista.

The 7 team spent a good deal of time on the defragger (as well as everything else) and from their explanation they've basically targeted defragging files *where it makes a significant difference* rather than just everything. This allows it to take far less time than usual and IMHO sounds pretty sensible (why defrag everything anyway?) so i'll probably just go with that for 7 and forget about 3rd part tools.

Also:

"Defragmentation in Windows 7 is more comprehensive – many files that could not be re-located in Windows Vista or earlier versions can now be optimally re-placed. In particular, a lot of work was done to make various NTFS metadata files movable. This ability to relocate NTFS metadata files also benefits volume shrink, since it enables the system to pack all files and file system metadata more closely and free up space “at the end” which can be reclaimed if required."

[Funkstar]

Fragmentation actually occurs most frequenty when handling large files. Generally speaking, the drive will fill up when handling lots of different sized files, particularly large ones...

As all my larg files (media etc.) is on the network, or non-OS drives, I don't think I would have muchproblems in that area.

I'll run a defrag later today, just to see how my OS partition is looking. It's been almost a year since I built this system.

[scaryjim]

I cleaned up and defragged a colleagues HD a few months ago and she reckoned she got about 10 minutes back at the start of her working day that was previously just waiting for Outlook to open. The biggest problem I've found on the machines I support is a fragmented pagefile. That's not good for *anyone*...

[0iD]

Where the good old page defrag comes into it's own

[dangel]

Where the good old page defrag comes into it's own

Sadly doesn't work for Vista or 7 though

You could:

- Move the pagefile to a different partition
- Defrag the original partition
- Move it back again

Which, most of the time, will give you one piece of pagefile - and assuming you set a fixed pagefile length it will stay that way. Otherwise, there are offline defraggers which will do it - or use one from a WinPE environment (or similar).

[scaryjim]

looks like a cool application, but I tend to make my pagefiles fixed size anyway which should (as I understand it) avoid them defragmenting in the first place. EDIT: I basically use a variation on the procedure dangel suggests (although a little more dramatic) - I set Windows for no pagefile at all, reboot, defrag, set a fixed size page file, reboot. That's noticably improved the performance of at least 3 colleagues' PCs in the last 2 months...

Anyway, this thread prompted me to analyse the hard drive in my work PC which was (according to Defraggler, which I'm giving a shot) 68% fragmented. Ooops

[Paul Adams]

SSD for the system & boot volumes, so no need to defrag there.

I partition my 2 SATA drives into ~40GB chunks and mount them as volume mount points under C:\Program Files, with 1 app or game per partition - this avoids me running into serious fragmentation problems in the first place (at the cost of slack disk space).

[ascension]

I defrag my HDDs regularly..well auto defrag actually with Diskeeper '09. Works perfectly.

[Shooty*]

about once a fortnight. O&O on my desktop, HTPC and laptop, PerfectDisc on my server.