MS Defraggers are worthless. In fact, less than worthless. They do nothing more than spin your drive and wear out your equipment.
if you want a defrag that will actually do something worth while, use the one in Norton Utilities.
Personally, I don't defrag. Ever. Haven't needed to since Windows 98SE.
Cheers
The pity is that Norton Utilities doesn't do that anymore. I'd heard they used to have a good one, so I downloaded a trial version of N.U., and when I told it to defrag it simply called the (crappy) Vista defrag. I'm SO GLAD I tried it before I plunked down money for it.
Ausologics defragger has been suggested. Is that a good one? What other optirons are there?
BTW....when a disk is not very full at all, say 75% free space, how does it get fragmented in the first place? Don't OS's have the smarts to put a file where it won't be fragmented?
I use the ausologic's every day. Plus weekly I use VOPT9 made by Golden Bow, it has a trial of 30days but $40 to register. Vopt9 is very good at compacting and many other use's
for the hard drive. I think it is one of the best.
Curt
I don't know about Win7 or Vista, but the defrag in XP was useless, as was Norton Utilities defrag. The problem with both of those is that XP locks down many of the system files and swap file, denying any program access to them- even Wondows defrag. I was trying to defrag an XP drive, and after running Windows defrag and Norton utilites defrag at least 10 times each (consecutively), Istill had well over 1000 fragments!
I switched to a program called Perfect Disk by RAXCO SOFTWARE. It places a hook in the boot sector to load a stand alone off-line defrag utility that defrags all the system files, boot sector, MFT files, directory entries, and swap file before windows loads and locks them. It even moves the swap file to the middle of the disk for faster access. It also keeps track of how often files are changed. With each use, it moved the unchanged files to the front, and frequently modified fioles to the back.. making future defrags faster.
I don't know if they make an app for Windows 7, but check out their website. They may even have a limited use copy you can download and try before you buy. And the price was pretty good- I think my copy for XP was under $30. And it made a huge difference in system performance- each defrag usually leaves less than 10-20 fragments.
Another way to slow down disk fragmentation is to set the swap file to a fixed size. By default, Windows dynamically allocates space to the swap file based on memory usage. Each time the swap file is resized, it causes fragmentation of the disk. By manually setting the swap file to a fixed size, that source of fragmentation is eliminated,
BTW....when a disk is not very full at all, say 75% free space, how does it get fragmented in the first place? Don't OS's have the smarts to put a file where it won't be fragmented?
No. They basically put files 'wherever'. Filesystems usually don't take fragmentation or file ordering into account when writing files. Also, when you edit a 30MB Word doc, change one letter, then resave... it doesn't re-write the entire 30MB file usually. That process of changing part of an existing file can easily create fragments. That happens all the time with log files, history / recently used, etc.
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Disk fragmentation ranks right up there with Radon gas as something to worry about...especially with the screaming processor speeds now common. I have NEVER seen any measureable performance increase after defragging a hard drive...on ANY operating system.
Eric
I have. Many times.
In fact I just defragged my XP system at home and it went from turtle slow to very usable.
I don't know about Win7 or Vista, but the defrag in XP was useless, as was Norton Utilities defrag. The problem with both of those is that XP locks down many of the system files and swap file, denying any program access to them- even Wondows defrag. I was trying to defrag an XP drive, and after running Windows defrag and Norton utilites defrag at least 10 times each (consecutively), Istill had well over 1000 fragments!
I switched to a program called Perfect Disk by RAXCO SOFTWARE. It places a hook in the boot sector to load a stand alone off-line defrag utility that defrags all the system files, boot sector, MFT files, directory entries, and swap file before windows loads and locks them. It even moves the swap file to the middle of the disk for faster access. It also keeps track of how often files are changed. With each use, it moved the unchanged files to the front, and frequently modified fioles to the back.. making future defrags faster.
I don't know if they make an app for Windows 7, but check out their website. They may even have a limited use copy you can download and try before you buy. And the price was pretty good- I think my copy for XP was under $30. And it made a huge difference in system performance- each defrag usually leaves less than 10-20 fragments.
Another way to slow down disk fragmentation is to set the swap file to a fixed size. By default, Windows dynamically allocates space to the swap file based on memory usage. Each time the swap file is resized, it causes fragmentation of the disk. By manually setting the swap file to a fixed size, that source of fragmentation is eliminated,
Windows ought to really do like Unix OSes and set up a separate swap partition. That way you aren't fragmenting the main filesystem.
Setting up a separate swap partition only helps if the swap space grows/shrinks. In typical operation, Windows doesn't grow the swapfile space unless absolutely forced to - and it'll give you a message to the effect.
Your suggestion helps Unix OSs a lot, but not Windows.
But even if you ignore what happens as a result of the swapfile, the OS itself still fragments the crap out of nearly anything it writes to more than a couple of times. System & security event logs, other log files, registry, directories, all files related to 'last used' programs, files you update, temporary internet files (really gets thrashed)... the list goes on and on.
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The need to defrag a drive is dependent on how many files are added and removed from the system over time. If all you ever do is surf the net and email, your dive can go for years without any real need to defragment it. If you add and remove programs and files on a regular bases, then defragging becomes more of a concern.
I thought about this thread last Thursday when a customer called in complaining about slow response on their server. When I went to RDP into the server, it took over 12 minutes for the connection to be fully established (I was surprised that it didn’t timeout). Once I got on the server I checked the available resources and I found that the server was barely utilizing the available CPU resources (about 4% spiking occasionally to 16% of the 8 available cores) and only using about a third of the 8GB on memory. That just leaves network and disk I/O. The network traffic was low but the drive was pegging the swap counters in performance monitor.
I check for fragmentation and found the system dive to have 89% file fragmentation. When I went into work yesterday, the defragmenter was just completing (yes it can take days if you let it get bad enough) and the system can now be logged into with the expected performance of a duel quad core system, the difference couldn’t be more dramatic.
There is no one answer for how often to defragment a drive; it all depends on how the system is being utilized. It will never do any harm to defrag a drive though.
We appreciate your support.
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