at what % do I defrag?

lordpuffer said:

genxie said:

I did analyze on my defrag and it said I have 1% defragmentation...at what percent should I defrag?

I put out the cash for Diskeeper 2010 Pro, and I noticed a huge performance improvement after I installed it....Just a suggestion.

Diskeeper 2010 Pro was one of the programs I was looking at. Great to see another member doing the same. Hope you can start a new thread about the program and your findings. Would also be great to see if other members and findings are over this utility.

Thanks
Polarbear

I run (state of the art) CCleaner and Auslogics defraggers monthly.

If it takes less than seconds, I run it more often.

Scientific, huh?

Not to stir controversy but just sharing my experience, Diskeeper for me was useless, always working and never defragging properly, I have since purchased o&o a few months ago and I gotta say the results for me are night and day. HD always stays defragged, I NEVER notice the HD tasking even when idle (complete opposite story with Diskeeper).

I completely forgot I had it installed!

win7clutz said:

I usually don't expect much from a defrag utility, but Diskeeper 2010 has produced a significant performance gain so won't argue with the results. It is worth the investment...

Can you please quantify this "significant performance gain" for those of us who need a bit more convincing that frequent defragging or additional defrag utilities are worth it.

Did it reduce your boot times from 75 seconds to 43 seconds? Did it increase your file copy speeds from an average of 42MB/s to 71MB/s, etc? I mean what really happened...aside from the notion that "it just feels faster".

My experience has resulted in very little (if any) noticeable difference on modern hard drives. I've been unable to prove with a stopwatch or other utility that things really did improve after taking the time to defrag...or letting the computer run all night to complete the defrag. But I'd willing to still hear from those who do see improvements to better understand why our experiences differ.

My opinion, I wouldn't go as far as stating that after market defrag software does a better job than the utilities included with windows but for me it's about functionality. Because of my triple boot situation and the fact that I am using Acronis OS Selector. There are a few files that if moved during a defrag, it deactivates the OS Selector during startup, therefore I need a program that allows me to specify exceptions to certain files during a defrag.

I'm still learning 7.64 so I don't know how good its defrag is yet, but on XP I could let my C: drive get fragmented for a month and notice Firefox taking 9 seconds to start instead of its usual 6 on its first run after a reboot. If I ran the XP defrag then it barely changed, but if I then ran JKDefrag it went back to 6 seconds. This was repeatable every time I started to notice the slower startup of various programs. So yes, I believe a good defrag program can help quite a bit in responsiveness.

Defragging in today's world is virtually a waste of time.

Question #1: are any BOOT-related files fragmented on your hard drive? If so, how MANY and in how many fragments?

Question #2: How much longer will it take to seek to each fragment (an add'l 15-20 milliseconds per seek + another 5 ms latency)? Let's say of all your boot-related OS files, there were 100 extra fragments. 100x .020 (20 ms) is 2 seconds.

From my recall of defragmenting my old XP system disk, MOST of the highly fragmented files are huge user files (i.e. NOT boot or OS-related).

Repeat: defragging is a VIRTUAL waste of time. Technically, you MIGHT reduce seeks, but it likely won't ever add up to anything you, a human, can ascertain or perceive.

I'm in the IBM large-scale mainframe computer performance field and I know disc access like the back of my hand (including controller logic). This myth won't die until we go full SSD. Oh, wait, there's arguments on whether to defrag a NON-HDA drive...

Additionally, are you aware of what Windows (since XP) does at startup to PREVENT seeks EVEN if the OS file is in fragments? Are you aware of what W7 does to also prevent seeks for fragmented files?

The question is actually not really at what %. You should just defrag your HDD whenever you're not using the computer for a few hours.