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

[Night Hawk]

Here I grabbed the entire package in one shot for a good lookover already having another package deal with the LiberKey program which also contains the Defraggler and Auslogics Disk Defrag option as well. That's another good one to look at.

One other one not mentioned so far comes from the good ole open source people over at sorceforge called UltraDefrag

 

[Victor S]

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!

Maybe it needs very little defragging anyway. I took a look at mine because I haven't checked it in a long time. At least since I put the SSD in 7 months ago. Might have defragged then. All I remember is noting that after installing the SSD, I verified the schedule was turned off. The D drive has apps installed, and sees a lot of read writes of various files, including video. The E and F only get synched with writes.
Surprised that the D shows no fragmentation. I ran analyze on all of them, but no defrag.

 

[Slartybart]

To Defrag or not Defrag, that is the question....

I have to disagree with the statement that "modern OSes/Disk formats eliminate the need to defrag...." (paraphrasing)

That being said, I should also say that you don't really have to worry about defragging your disk. As another member pointed out, Win7 defaults to an automatic weekly defrag schedule. This regular maintenance makes up for most inefficiencies in the file system.

The old debate is that defrag makes the mechanical device work and this "extra" work is essentially wear and tear, limiting the life of the device. Makes sense, unless you consider that the device works extra hard finding all of the fragmented file pieces of fragmented files, and that this extra work occurs every day all the time you use your computer. Defrag helps organize the files and helps reduce the seek time, but fragmentation occurs all the time, every time a file is created or updated.

The discussion on defrag was renewed when Solid State Devices came into vogue. The wear and tear argument switched from mechanical to electrical. Too many say "It will damage the drive" - it won't.
It is true that the topology of SSD drives differ and that you gain little defragging an SSD, it won't damage it. Any drive takes a lot more "exercise" in day to day operation, be it a mechanical or electronic device.


References:
Disk Defragmentation Explained
What is disk defragmentation?
The Importance of Disk Defragmentation
Why Should I Defragment My Hard Drive

 

[Night Hawk]

One of the old arguments was that any system with a fragmented drive would be taking a hugh performance hit. In fact when finding one drive at 11% I didn't even realize it was that high even since it wasn't even noticible.

With a drive being fragmented of course your access time to browse to and open up various folders would be increased to an extent. The back and forth and all around to find pieces of files can be more of a hassle then a wear and tear factor but still would want to be corrected. Here the drives are set to never spin down so it wouldn't make any large difference as far as the delay is spin up and spin down when going to access something on a different drive.

I still haven't got into any SSD since the prices are stil exhorbant for any good sized model as well as which brand has what out to rush after one at this time. With usb flash drives being a very close cousin to SSDs you can look but will not find hardly any fragmentation to even worry about. With SSDs you would likely see a small amount more there being used for OSs. That still wouldn't be the large concern it would have been 10-15yrs. ago however.