Home Premium - defragmentation takes forever

Windows 7's built-in defragger tends to use lots of CPU usage during the "Consolidation/Consolidated" passes, and it cannot take advantage of more than 1 CPU (or core). For instance, on my 3GHZ Core 2 Duo laptop, 1 core is constantly at 100% utilization from the svchost.exe that is the Disk Defragmenter engine. It takes a few hours to get past each Consolidated stage each time. The defragmentation stages are a different story, they are fast and I/O bound, not CPU bound.

Defraggler is even worse with CPU usage, and it can take full advantage of a dual core/dual CPU setup, but still be very CPU bound.

It's like you need an Intel Ivybridge or AMD Piledriver chipset just to run defrag and keep it I/O bound as it should!

Hi all
I might be the odd man out here or the "5th" player in a string quartet but I've NEVER DEFRAGED a Disk --even going back to as far as Windows 3.11 !!

I've always kept the OS and programs on a separate partition to Data / movies / films etc and can honestly say I've never needed to defrag a disk.

If your HDD is 320 GB and needs defragmentation -- well I'm not sure what you are running.

In any case NTFS file system doesn't really need this type of process.

If you MUST do this often an easier way is simply to back up your data with an imaging program and then restore it again -- these imaging programs don't copy free space and are not sector by sector copying programs (unless you force them to copy like that in the options) so the restore will have effectively "optimised" the data chains.

This type of operation will only take around 20-60 mins even on a LARGE system so it will in any case beat using the usually incredibly slow defragmentation system.

Cheers
jimbo

NTFS file system compression really encourages fragmentation. I use it on the directory that has all my games on it, and also in my bittorrent folder.

I had to defragment my games directory after I modded my half-life 2 installation with Cinematic Mod 11 .... lots of files.

Would have taken half the time if my CPU would keep up (defragger engine written better).