Windows 7: Does Scheduled Defrags analyze the disk first?

I have my disk defragmenter set to run every Sunday at 6, yet sometimes I'll go back after 6 and do a disk analysis and I'll see that 1-2% is defragged! Does the scheduled disk defrag program not analyze the disk first? If that's the case it will never defrag anyway, right?

You mean 1-2% is fragmented, right? Based on what you are saying, chances are it is analyzind first, then deciding that defragging the hard drive isn't worth it. If a HDD is only 1% fragmente, then their is no measurable gain aquired by defragging. It would need to be more than 5% fragmented before any noticable slowdown occurs.

Yeah that's what I meant, and that's what I thought, except if that's true why does it say either say that 0% is fragmented and/or not even update the date it was last scanned? (I can't remember which one it does, but I'll go back after 6 and it will either say that 0% is defragged and the current date or 0% defragged and date won't have changed. Either way, it's wrong.)

Why not change to defrag once every couple months or even twice a year. What is the point of defragging every week? I have never seen defrag make any difference in performance unless the drive was over 25% fragmented and even then the performance difference was hardly noticeable.

Fair enough - I'll switch my schedule to once every couple of weeks, though I'm still curious to know what threshhold Windows 7 uses to decide if it's going to defrag or not.

I found this:

1. Go to Start and type in eventvwr.msc (without the quotes) and press Enter.
2. Expand the Windows logs heading, then select the Application log file entry.
3. Double click on the Source column header.
4. Scroll down the list until you find wininit (the Chkdsk entry)

If you want to post any of it here, select the text on the General tab then press Ctrl+C to copy it then paste the results into your next post.

Posted by Lee here: Board Message