Advised not to de-frag C: drive because of volume shadow copy

[rzn6jw]

I was in the process of de-fraging my drives using UniBlue Disk Rescue, and I got the advisory message not to de-frag the C: drive (Windows 7 system drive) because it was owned by volume shadow copy (I back up this drive automatically each week).

Should I worry about not de-fraging the drive or can I turn off volume shadow copy, de-frag, then turn volume shadow copy back on?

I've been using this drive since I installed Win 7 earlier this year and imaging there's a lot of fragments floating around.

 

[zigzag3143]

I was in the process of de-fraging my drives using UniBlue Disk Rescue, and I got the advisory message not to de-frag the C: drive (Windows 7 system drive) because it was owned by volume shadow copy (I back up this drive automatically each week).

Should I worry about not de-fraging the drive or can I turn off volume shadow copy, de-frag, then turn volume shadow copy back on?

I've been using this drive since I installed Win 7 earlier this year and imaging there's a lot of fragments floating around.

Defragging on a normal drive is advised, why not use a de-fragger that can do C:\ like the built in one, or perfect disk?

 

[logicearth]

The reason for this massage has to do with the way the defragmentation software does it. In other words it would cause System Restore to bloat up in size because the software causes the system to move files in a way that is not compatibily with System Restore.

 

[SledgeDG]

Which makes me wonder, if (especially with today's faster harddrives) there is still a point in defragging.
Do I actually gain anything or is it just a weekly HDD stress test ?

-DG

 

[eldinv]

Which makes me wonder, if (especially with today's faster harddrives) there is still a point in defragging.
Do I actually gain anything or is it just a weekly HDD stress test ?

-DG

Probably not much of an improvement, but in Windows 7 just let it do its thing.

 

[rzn6jw]

Thanks everybody for all the information. Seems that UniBlue is over-cautious. Will use the Windows de-frag on the C: drive.

 

[smarteyeball]

Which makes me wonder, if (especially with today's faster harddrives) there is still a point in defragging.
Do I actually gain anything or is it just a weekly HDD stress test ?

-DG

With today's faster (7200+) drives and more efficient Operating Systems, normal fragmentation is virtually a non-issue.

Even heavily fragmented drives aren't the major performance boogeyman they used to be.

 

[eldinv]

Which makes me wonder, if (especially with today's faster harddrives) there is still a point in defragging.
Do I actually gain anything or is it just a weekly HDD stress test ?

-DG

With today's faster (7200+) drives and more efficient Operating Systems, normal fragmentation is virtually a non-issue.

Even heavily fragmented drives aren't the major performance boogeyman they used to be.

That and Windows 7 isn't like XP, where in the past we had a number of 3rd party applications to run it efficiently. Windows 7 is pretty efficient and doesn't require sooo many 3rd applications.

 

[Keiichi25]

Actually, from my experience, it isn't so much performance, but also just dealing with the minor quirks with programs in general. Whether or not that issue has been really or truly resolved since the days of 95... I have found that fragmentation not only leads to a decrease in performance over time, but sometimes introduces program loading quirks.

I've seen some programs where if it is fragmented just enough (Like hasn't been defragged for months...) You can get a program to load up, but then fault out on something it has done numerous times before without problems.

 

[Layback Bear]

I have tried 3rd party defragers and I went back to built in W7 defrager. Will it help, well IMHO it can't hurt and it might help. With W7 defrager you can analyze you hard drive and you will know in a minute or so weather you need to defrag. For me it seems that W7 don't get fragmented very much. I don't know why that is. Keep this in mind, 10% fragmented on a 300gig drive won't take long but 10% on a tig drive will take a lot of time.

 

[SledgeDG]

I haven't manually defragmented my drives ever since I switched from XP to Vista (~about 2 years ago).
This thread made me check it out again. When I learned, that Windows 7 runs an automated defragment once a week I got curious/investigative. If you enter "disk defragmenter" into the search dialog, you'll get info about the last run. It showed all my drives had been processed sucessfully so I just leave it alone to do its thing and enjoy Microsoft's best OS so far
Thanks to all here who helped giving me their opinion on that matter.
BTW: since the last run my C-drive fragmented by 5%. To see how long it would take I ran the program manually..it took less than 20 minutes.



-DG

 

[Bill2]

When you defrag, the computer moves all the files, and parts of files, around on the physical disk surface, to optimize their layout and reduce seek times. When this happens, VSS (Volume shadow copy) interprets each movement as a change to a file, and tries to record the previous version. Obviously,that will make your hard disk fill up extremely rapidly, which is why it’s a bad idea to use a defragmenter if VSS is running.

If you dont want to use the inbuilt win7 defrag, then use something that is compatible with VSS. I believe the recent versions of Auslogics and Diskeeper are VSS compatible.


​