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hello - was wondering thoughts on Vista defrag. mine has been running for 24 hours now - just a 500g HD. i have read that some people's defrag's with Vista have taken up to 12 hours, but 24?? is this normal and should i wait this out or just cancel it?

wow, that sounds like a fairly long amount of time, i usually go with other stuff since i don't like wasting too much time on that sort of thing.
if you want a quicker defrag try ultradefrag, jkdefrag, or defraggler. they run average maybe about 1-2 hours on my 500gb hdd, afterwards i'm happy enough
i personally run defraggler most of the time, the downside to it is just single drive or drive partition at a time
there are other 3rd party defraggers on the market, like o&o and auslogics and whatever, you might just consider trying a new defragging system out for the hell of it
just my 2 cents, hope it helps

Raxco PerfectDisk is the best defragger on the market, but it is not free. Some of those others are decent too, but I haven't used any of the free ones.

That is far too long. I would run chkdsk to see if you have any bad sectors on that disk. Otherwise, you might try a third party defrag tool. I use Auslogics.

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/di ... /download/

How long since your last defrag? How much free space does it have?

It's going to take a long time, especially if you used a -w switch.

There's no reason to be running manual defrags. Let the OS manage it in the future.

I personally LOVE Defraggler. It defrags and compacts at the same time...unlike the built in MS defrag.

You should let it run and do other things in the meanwhile. It's not like you have to sit and wait while it's working.

Also, don't buy defragging applications unless you're a server system administrator with OCD. They bring no benefit anywhere otherwise.

ty all for the replies. my HD is using 144G out of 500. i have never manually run defrag in the 2 years since i built the system. defrag was set to run every week at 1am - my PC is usually off at that time so not sure if it runs degrag when i boot up the next morning. anyway, after 26 hours i canceled and Vista did some type of disk check - a few minutes later i got a message saying the disk is optimal and does not need to be defragged at this time (or something to that effect).

guess i am OK and in the future i will check out some of the options you all posted.

thank you

To be safe, check the disk for errors with the utility that's located above the defrag button. It should take less than an hour, after you leave the office.

Yeah, I'd do a chkdsk (ie what wibeasley recommends) just to be sure.

How much free space was there on the disk when you started the defrag? As a volume gets full it's harder for the defrag to work efficiently and it takes exponentially longer as you approach 100% full (IOW, delete stuff you no longer need and use the clean-up wizard before running a defrag). On the other hand, if the disk is mostly empty a defrag isn't going to make much of any discernible difference.

The scheduled defrags in Vista don't seem to happen if the machine is off at the scheduled time; on machines like that which have consequently never had a defrag I use Auslogic (on a one-time basis) since it is free, fast, and seems generally well-written.

Might be worth checking what mode the disk is running in for IDE at least, if it's PIO instead of DMA that would cause it to be slow. I don't think this impacts native SATA drives but not really sure.

tfp wrote:

Might be worth checking what mode the disk is running in for IDE at least, if it's PIO instead of DMA that would cause it to be slow. I don't think this impacts native SATA drives but not really sure.

SATA can go to PIO mode if the OS detects too many CRC errors (usually from failing/sub-par data cable).

Ok didn't know for sure, does it still show up in the same places or do you have to use a different tool to see the SATA transfer speeds?

tfp wrote:

Ok didn't know for sure, does it still show up in the same places or do you have to use a different tool to see the SATA transfer speeds?

Most controller vendor have a downloadable tool that shows the devices on the controller and their transfer rates.