Defragging..............Either It Is, or It Isn't!!

[jack1953]

So many conflicting opinions about defragging! I've heard opinions from computer techies, from one extreme to the other.

I've heard some say it's actually harmful for your hard drive and completely unnecessary to it's essential to keep your PC running faster and smoother and will actually add to your hard drive!

Now I am a mediocre user and have absolutely zero knowledge and experience inside the machine but I know enough to know that those two statements above cannot POSSIBLY be true.

Either it is good for the machine or it isn't.

Can anyone who has credible knowledge shed some light on this for me, ............. please???

Thanks,

Jack

 

[robinb9]

I have been defragging my computers once a month using Windows defragger. If it was hurting my machines they all would be dead by now, my oldest is 8 years old and it is still going strong and I actually updated it to Windows 7 recently by adding memory and swapping out the graphic card for one that works with 7

The others are from 5, 6, 2 and 1 year old

Defragging is like cleaning out your brain, you are cleaning out and re organizing all the files (like your brain cells)
which makes the HD (like your brain) run smoother

 

[Layback Bear]

I will keep it simple because that's me. Fragmentation is when one program or application ect. was installed and there wasn't one complete space on the hard drive to put all of it. So the operating system puts pieces here and there. When you ask you computer to use program (A) it has to search for it. Of course it is going to have to search in several places on the hard drive because that is the way program (A) was installed. That slow things down; the spinning of the disc and the little arm jump all over looking for the pieces parts of program (A). When you defrag a hard disc the defrag programs looks for all these little pieces to Program (A) and tries to put them all in the same place all together. So next time you want to use program (A) the system finds everything in one place. Microsoft in designing Windows 7 has some how made it so it doesn't get fragment as much as the older system. Defrag is always good but it does vary in degrees. That is why Windows 7 defrag gives you a method of checking your hard drive to see how much defrag has occoured. I can't remember any time my hard drive computer with Windows 7 ever got over 3 or 4% fragmented. With that little of fragmentation doing a de frag would show very little increase in speed. If a system with a hard drive got say 15 to 20 % fragmented you would notice a difference in speed. It would also depend on the rpm of the hard drive and other things but I said I would keep it simple. Not short.
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Now to answer you questions.
The wear and tear on the hard drive because of doing a defrag use to be in question. Todays quality hard drives in my opinion it doesn't hurt them.
The less time a hard drive has to spin up and hunt and peck for things that are fragmented all over the hard drive more than compensates for the wear done by defragging. If I found my hard drive fragmented lets say 20% I would defrag more often so it wouldn't get to 20% again.
Defragging is a good thing when needed.

 

[Night Hawk]

Over the years I only defragged occasionally while the fragmentation was fortunately reasonable despite the older versions going back to the Legacy days where every maintainence task was manual. Once I noticed a level of fragmentation being seen the defrag tool in Windows was run. It was that simple.

Starting first with Vista and later 7 as well as 8 now out MS incorporated an improved automatic maintainence tool namely the Task Scheduler where Windows keeps tabs on things. The MS page for this is seen at Features of the Windows Vista hard disk defragmentation utility

With XP you could set things up to see an automatic process tend to keeping the fragmentation low or non existant while the newer versions implimented an automated process where yiou hardly see any level unless you store a large volume of files and some files by themselves become heavily fragmented.

At one time with the older version lacking these things once a drive saw a high percentage the overall system performance became sloppy! You had to get in there and run the defrag tool to get it back down again or suffer! Since Vista's time plus some other recommended 3rd party tool have been seen it's usually rare to find any drive in desperite need unless the system is totally neglected!

One of those good little freebies that actually defrags a drive at a much faster pace then the Windows defrag tool you can grab at any time is the Pinform Defraggler which is a lightweight app and goes on fast. You won't even know that one is running when you start it up. I hardly use it here however since I generally don't find much above the 0% level with two main storage drives along with two OS drives since the automatic maintainence keeps it down low.

 

[Layback Bear]

How about that for service. robinb9, Night Hawk and myself got there almost at the same time with answers for you.
Jack if you have any more question fell free to ask.

 

[jack1953]

You guys are fantastic! If I am understanding you right, then on my Windows 7 OS, I should defrag only if it gets to a certain percentage.

Two questions.

What is a good ballpark percentage?

Are there defrag programs out there that can be set to defrag at a certain percentage?

Thanks.

Jack

 

[Night Hawk]

You know it's a good thing I decided to check since I never checked the host/boot drive or second OS drive following the clean of 7 and repartitioning on the second back last June as far as using the Analyze Disk option. And what do you know despite those two drives and how much I pack onto the two storage drives as well as deleting files at times have a look.

Now that's having over 500gb of files on each of the two 1tb storage drives and still finding it at 0%. It shows the automatic maintainence is working all by itself. The 3rd party option simply ends up as an option!

 

[jack1953]

You know it's a good thing I decided to check since I never checked the host/boot drive or second OS drive following the clean of 7 and repartitioning on the second back last June as far as using the Analyze Disk option. And what do you know despite those two drives and how much I pack onto the two storage drives as well as deleting files at times have a look.

Now that's having over 500gb of files on each of the two 1tb storage drives and still finding it at 0%. It shows the automatic maintainence is working all by itself. The 3rd party option simply ends up as an option!

Wow Hawk! I guess the proof is in the pudding! Good stuff to know!!

 

[jack1953]

You know it's a good thing I decided to check since I never checked the host/boot drive or second OS drive following the clean of 7 and repartitioning on the second back last June as far as using the Analyze Disk option. And what do you know despite those two drives and how much I pack onto the two storage drives as well as deleting files at times have a look.

Now that's having over 500gb of files on each of the two 1tb storage drives and still finding it at 0%. It shows the automatic maintainence is working all by itself. The 3rd party option simply ends up as an option!

Do you leave your machine on overnight? Just wondered because you have it scheduled to defrag at 1am.

 

[Layback Bear]

That is Windows 7 built in defrag isn't it? No 3rd part program.

 

[AdrianRon]

I been using this tool for aeons - in my experience its just like cleaning out yr fridge or better yet toilet bowl. how often depends on the usage of the pc. cos if u use ur computer like for almost evrything 24/7 then u shud defrag more frequently. generally by an avg user once every 4 weeks or a month shud do the trick. altho some ppl wud say its not neccesary.

 

[Night Hawk]

No I never leave it running 24/7 except on a few occasions. I likely forgot to reset the scheduled maintainence to something else like sunday night at 1am when the av program runs the weekly sweep. I now have that set for sunday rather then wednesday at 8pm to run ahead of the av program's own scheduled time.

As you can see right away from this despite all the activity on these drives the scheduled run isn't a necessary daily event and can even be put off onto a monthly schedule. The Windows Task Scheduler following the June 12 clean install simply set the day and time to run the defrag automatically.

The Defraggler program is still a great one to have onhand by the way if you ever decided to uncheck the scheduled run on one or more drives or all drives and then find a level of fragmentation has come up. The small app there does run quite fast when compared. The thing is with the defrag tool already scheduled I never have to use it!

As for how high you would ever want to allow any fragmentation to go you wouldn't want to see any while I've seen upwards of 11% or more on older XP builds and then manually ran the defrag to clean things up unfortunately before the Defraggler program came out. That was sssslowww in those days even slower on 9x despite being smaller drives.

Now for the programs out there there aren't too many freebies while most are free. But there are some paid for programs like System Mechanic for a hefty price that include a defrag option. For server applications you may tend to find more programs that offer the automatic startup once a certain level of fragmentation is reached. All programs however are geared to reduce down to 0% when possible or down as far as can be if not seeing a 100% total defrag.

 

[Britton30]

Defragging in w7 is less important to performance that is was in XP or Win 9x. It does still keep the system running smoothly as possible.
Defragging a SSD (Solid State Drive) is not recommended though. w7 will automatically disable the auto defrag when it detects one in the system.

A good 3rd party defrag is Puran Defrag Free, it will work well with the w7 files system. It has the option to run a boot time defrag too.

 

[AdrianRon]

Why wudd u not recommend defragging an SSD ?

 

[Britton30]

Why wudd u not recommend defragging an SSD ?

It's not my recommendation. Defragging causes writes and reads to a SSD which increases wear on the nand cells which have a limited number they can have before they become unusable. In practice, it may not wear out a SSD but preformance will slow.
Read: Why you should not defrag an SSD - ever: PC Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review

 

[AdrianRon]

Ahh thanks Britton - havent had much exp with an SSD as its very expensive here about 1k per unit for like 60GB or something pretty ridiculous. So we rarely use it

 

[Britton30]

Ahh thanks Britton - havent had much exp with an SSD as its very expensive here about 1k per unit for like 60GB or something pretty ridiculous. So we rarely use it

You're welcome, it is bad things are so expensive there, still prices are coming down.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Ahh thanks Britton - havent had much exp with an SSD as its very expensive here about 1k per unit for like 60GB or something pretty ridiculous. So we rarely use it

You're welcome, it is bad things are so expensive there, still prices are coming down.

+1 Gary especially when you see a lot of the stuff is manufactured there and you would half think the stuff would be a slightly less because of the negligible shipping even if it came from say Thailand.

To Jack though if you are concerned re the integrity of the drive/s the there are tons of stuff to test them with and one I use is the surface test wit Partition Wizard - a handy tool in itself and free!
Partition Manager Server, server partition manager and partition magic server for Windows Server 2000/2003/2008. Server Partition software for Windows Server and None-Server partitions

 

[Night Hawk]

What gets me is how easy it was to forget to run the defrag's analyze option since in the past right after any clean install of Windows as well every so often that would be something I would do automatically to keep up with things.

With the Prefetch and other things that followed the Legacy days and with Vista/7 bringing in improvements the most I have seen as far as the level of fragmentation over the last several years was 11% on one old drive and then remedied fast just by running the defrag tool itself. On other occasions any fragmentation was limited to files not the drive itself until eventually the files were either dumped or replaced over time like a fresh download for some program as an example.

As for the Puran site I would need to spend some time looking over what they have there before being able to recommend any of their app there. It seems one main program called Puran Utilities is what you get which wraps up several tools in one main package over Defraggler which is a totally separate one purpose only program.

 

[Britton30]

Yup, only the free Puran Defrag.
Puran Defrag Download
Highly recommended by GregRocker.

I just installed it, be careful you don't install the Bablon Search Bar, it is UNchecked by default.