Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
Dede wrote:Hi,
It seems that a large terabyte hard drive would take a very long time to defrag. Is there a method one can use that would shorten the defrag time and if so, what is it?
Would this work? Putting partitions on the hard drive and only defrag the partitions the are used a lot. Is there a defrag program that just defrags a selected partition, if so, what is the name of the program?
Thanks
Dede wrote:Hi,
It seems that a large terabyte hard drive would take a very long time to defrag. Is there a method one can use that would shorten the defrag time and if so, what is it?
Would this work? Putting partitions on the hard drive and only defrag the partitions the are used a lot. Is there a defrag program that just defrags a selected partition, if so, what is the name of the program?
Thanks
Buub wrote:Best defragger, bar none, IMHO is Raxco PerfectDisk. Not free, but it works extremely well.
It may take several hours for the initial defrag, but it will finish it if you let it (unlike Diskeeper, which seems to take many passes). The buit-in Windows defragger is just a stripped-down version of Diskeeper.
morphine wrote:Ditto. Defragging a drive nowadays doesn't have the same effect as it used to, as NTFS is much better at housekeeping, but even then, a defrag every few months (assuming heavy use) is quite noticeable.
morphine wrote:May be and likely is moot with SSDs though.
just brew it! wrote:The absolute *best* way to defrag a data drive is to copy the entire contents to another drive, reformat the original partition, then copy everything back again.
The Linux filesystem guys claim that ext2/3/4 isn't affected by fragmentation, and that's why they've never bothered to create an official Linux filesystem defrag tool.
bthylafh wrote:just brew it! wrote:The absolute *best* way to defrag a data drive is to copy the entire contents to another drive, reformat the original partition, then copy everything back again.
For small values of "best". That's a lot of work for not much gain vs traditional techniques.
Buub wrote:Best defragger, bar none, IMHO is Raxco PerfectDisk. Not free, but it works extremely well.
It may take several hours for the initial defrag, but it will finish it if you let it (unlike Diskeeper, which seems to take many passes). The buit-in Windows defragger is just a stripped-down version of Diskeeper.
thegleek wrote:Puran Defrag (free / $19.95)
Firestarter wrote:With the built-in defragger of Vista and 7 I really don't see the need to concern yourself with this. They keep fragmentation pretty low, and if I ever noticed them defragging, it was when the system was idle and it stopped as soon as I touched the mouse. Any tiny performance edge you might get out of manually defragging is offset by the time (and even money) you spend researching, installing, testing and running the software. The only reason I can think of is if you need to be absolutely positive that something like a video recording hard drive will have 100% of its performance 100% of the time.
ludi wrote:Vista & Win7 automatically schedule a weekly defrag event for HDDs. On Win7, I believe it starts at 1am Wednesday assuming the system is up at the time, not sure about Vista.
WinXP of course still has the barebones version of DiskKeeper Lite that was integrated with Win2k but AFAIK it can only be invoked manually, not scheduled.
IrateAdmin wrote:I use Defraggler every so often on my HDDs.
http://www.piriform.com/defraggler
Works great. Doesn't seem to take that long.
EsotericLord wrote:While this is true, Win 7 will also automatically defrag when the computer is idle should it miss that 1am Wednesday schedule.
axeman wrote:I imagine defragging an SSD repeated could significantly shorten it's useful life, as if MLC drives didn't have enough challenges as it is.
just brew it! wrote:axeman wrote:I imagine defragging an SSD repeated could significantly shorten it's useful life, as if MLC drives didn't have enough challenges as it is.
While I'm generally inclined to agree with this statement, I can also think of a couple of reasons why it might be untrue:
1) If you're writing enough data to the SSD that wear-out is a real concern, the additional write activity from defragging is probably the least of your worries.
2) Periodically moving data around might actually help the wear-leveling algorithm, by freeing up (relatively) lightly used blocks which would otherwise remain unavailable for re-use.
That said, given that there's no performance benefit to defragging a SSD it is almost certainly best to just leave well enough alone.
thegleek wrote:If its such a concern to defrag a SSD, then I'm never buying one. I should be able to defrag a SSD weekly or daily if i WANT to... Without ever worrying about any degradation.
just brew it! wrote:In fact, it's like refusing to buy a really nice shirt that never gets dirty and is in no way improved by washing, just because if you wash it a ridiculous number of times the color fades. There are all sorts of products that don't work right or fail early if you abuse them; the people who happily buy and use them just know to avoid that abuse.It's like refusing to buy a really nice shirt because the color fades if you wash it 10 times a day, every day for a month!
just brew it! wrote:It is "best" in the sense that it reduces fragmentation to zero in a single pass, and works on any filesystem (even ones that don't support defraggers like ext4).