Defrag- Bad?

[iPwntUrMum]

Hi all. I recently read in (I believe it was) PC Magazine about how defragging an ssd is bad for it. I also read that defragging a spinning hard drive isn't always beneficial. So, should I continue to defrag, or not?

Another thing- I use Defraggler, and whenever it analyses my hd for fragmentation, it always says it is about 30% fragmented. Even after I defrag it. What's up with that? Does that support what PC Mag said?

Thanks
iPuM

[Shaio]

If Your on windows 7 stuff is automatically defragged, You shouldn't really bother with a secondary app, vista might of done it too, but not that i noticed.

The advantage of your solid state drive is that it has good random access times isn't it? I'd of thought defragging them would be semi-redundant, but alas I've not had the spare money to grab one and mess around yet.

[TheColinz]

Defrag Fine.

Not bad at all make sure yu pc not 10 years old .

[Big Boss]

Defragging a HDD is good, defraging an SSD is unnecessary and may cause problems.

[iPwntUrMum]

Shaio, I wish I had an ssd

Big Boss, so what is up with the constant ~30% fragmentation then? If it doesn't go lower, there's no point of defragging..

[Big Boss]

Try with a different Defragger, such as Windows built-in one. If that doesn't work, I'd wonder if you've partitioned your HD or anything like that?

[Bartzy]

Defrag = good
Not defrag = bad

[Doono]

Defragging a SSD is a bad idea because it causes additional write cycles to each sector as files are shuffled around, it's also pointless as on a ssd there is practically no seek time and defragging will make almost no difference to this. I see no problem with defragging a standard hard-drive except it takes ages

[Smokey]

Another thing- I use Defraggler, and whenever it analyses my hd for fragmentation, it always says it is about 30% fragmented. Even after I defrag it. What's up with that? Does that support what PC Mag said?

Reasons why some files remains defragmented are:
1. Lock by the system (pagefiles and system files in use);
2. Not enough contiguous space. For example you have a 300Mb file and your maximum contiguous space is 250Mb you can't defrag it.

[GasMask]

De frag is good im not sure where you are reading or listening to its bad because it clears up fragmented files this makes programmes run faster and operate at a faster process.

[mrcrusty]

Defragging is good for normal hard drives, but not recommended for SSD's as it is unnecessary and could potentially shorten it's lifespan.

The basic Windows defragger is fine, if you are still showing fragmentation after a defragging, it means that those files can't be moved. Windows will prevent certain types of essential system files from being defragmented (swap/page file). Smokey pretty much has it right.

[Simetrical]

Hi all. I recently read in (I believe it was) PC Magazine about how defragging an ssd is bad for it. I also read that defragging a spinning hard drive isn't always beneficial. So, should I continue to defrag, or not?

You should not defrag an SSD. It won't help, and might hurt. Normal hard disks may need to be defragmented regularly, at least on Windows, but recent versions of Windows (I think Vista or later?) should automatically do this in the background for you, so you shouldn't have to worry about it.

Another thing- I use Defraggler, and whenever it analyses my hd for fragmentation, it always says it is about 30% fragmented. Even after I defrag it.

First, make sure you have enough free space. If your disk is more than maybe 80% full, the defragmenter might have trouble, and the disk will fragment again quickly.

Then try with the built-in Windows defragmenter. If that still doesn't work, you can reboot and try again. If that also doesn't help, you could reboot into safe mode and defrag from there, to minimize the number of open files, if you care that much. (For some reason, Windows doesn't allow open files to be defragmented, IIRC.)

I wouldn't worry too much if the disk is only 30% fragmented, though. You're probably fine. Fragmentation percentage is kind of meaningless anyway, you really want to look at the fragments' size . . . if lots of files are fragmented, but the fragments are 10 MB or more, it probably won't hurt performance too much. (Figure maybe 10 ms to seek on a consumer disk, 100+ ms to read 10 MB serially, so only ~10% hit in that case.)

2. Not enough contiguous space. For example you have a 300Mb file and your maximum contiguous space is 250Mb you can't defrag it.

Well, the defragmenter can move any intervening files to other places so as to free up more contiguous space. It should normally do this. But if you don't have enough free space on the drive, it might have to move too many files for it to bother. As long as you have enough total free space, you should be able to defragment fine in principle, except for the weird thing about open files.

[iPwntUrMum]

Thanks for the tips Sim. I dunno if I should even bother, though, seeing as how it might not be that badly fragmented. I'm running Vista, so it might defrag in the background.

Big Boss, I have only 1 partition, one that came with this computer (a converted dell stock) that is a recovery partition with only 14 gb of space. I've never defragged it.

[Smokey]

Yes default Vista has scheduled defragmentation enabled (once a week) , SSD users be warned vitsa will automatically defrag regardless.

[Taiji]

Hmmm do I really want defrag going on in the background? .... not good at multitasking and I have things to do that it will affect, like gaming, for example, and generally using my computer, so no, I don't.

XP tip for defrag: Turn off virtual memory when defragging a drive containing the swapfile.

[Simetrical]

Hmmm do I really want defrag going on in the background? .... not good at multitasking and I have things to do that it will affect, like gaming, for example, and generally using my computer, so no, I don't.

Vista supports I/O prioritization, and background defrag should run at Very Low priority. The description in Windows System Internals (Fifth Edition, p. 598 ff.) suggests that it will still do some disk access, but only on the order of 2 KB/s if other processes are doing I/O at the same time. This shouldn't cause a significant performance hit in principle, although it might be noticeable in some cases.

I'd be interested to see if you can tell the difference in practice between a Very Low I/O priority defragmenter running or not. I'd suspect not – two I/Os per second is probably below the rate you get from random background activity. SuperFetch also runs at Very Low.

XP tip for defrag: Turn off virtual memory when defragging a drive containing the swapfile.

This seems like a waste of effort. It's only one file, and probably not broken into more than a few fragments anyway. If it is, then disabling swap and re-enabling it should have the same effect of defragmentating the page file, without having to run a defragmenter.

[Taiji]

If you're not bothered about 1/10th of an fps or similar increases in performance, or thereabouts, combining to produce noticeably improved performance, then I'm really not worth listening to. In most cases anything that uses the hdd should not be happening while I am busy playing games.

This seems like a waste of effort. It's only one file, and probably not broken into more than a few fragments anyway. If it is, then disabling swap and re-enabling it should have the same effect of defragmentating the page file, without having to run a defragmenter.

It's broken into fragments for people that haven't yet done as I suggest. That's why I suggested it, and you can probably see for yourself

BTW I expect the same is true for 7 and vista.

But for various reasons XP is my main OS, so I don't yet care to find out.

Actually disabling virtual memory does not defrag the rest of the data on the drive for you. So when you make your new swapfile by turning virtual memory back on, it will be fragmented unless you defragged it manually.

Going on with virtual memory, I set my double my mem size as both minimum and maximum.

This means that I can't exceed the minimum, which means the file can't grow and become fragmented itself, or cause more fragmentation with newly arrived data.

[Strelok]

Depends on:

How much data is stored on the disk
How many fragments there are
How many free space gaps there are
The defragmentation utility itself.

Let's say you have a 500GB drive that is 60% full. Let's say that 40% of the drive is fragmented and there are tons of free space gaps (and the specific defragmentation utility also fills free space gaps by moving files down into them), that is a lot of disk writing to do, but this is an extreme case and this type of fragmentation level takes time to accumilate. The stress done on the hard disk by all the disk writes *may* be outwieghed by less stress by not having to read fragmented data or through large free space gaps (the header having to move across the disk more).

For the page file, what you want to do is disable it, reboot, delete it and create a new one. What you want to do here is to make the initial and maximum size the exact same. The size needed is relative to your system. 2048 or 3096MB should be a good size to cover almost all systems. After this, the page file wont become fragmented again, because it won't move. It becomes fragmented if the page file grows from having different initial and maximum sizes. It does this to accumulate for significant memory usage changes, but a size like the one I posted above should be stable for most systems.

The scheduled defragmenter in Vista/7 should only run on idle or when doing non-heavy amount of tasking. It also runs on a low I/O priority and shouldn't affect system performance much. It will halt when running something like a game, too.

You'll have to consider how extreme you want to go. Almost all defragmenters should defragment files optimally, but different defragmentation utilities have different ideas on things like free space fragmentation. The beginning of the disk is in the outer-ring which is the fastest in seek times, read speed and write speed. The performance benefit of this is sometimes minimal and always circumstancial. Some defragmenters will aim to fill most free space gaps, but also place files from the beginning to the end of the disk in the priority. For example, have the MFT and directories at 30% into the disk, then have prefetch and boot-files at the very beginning, then have files under 50MB (which on a lot of systems includes a lot of system files and the most accessed files) and then everything else.

One important thing about free space gap consolidation and putting directories into a sorting order is a circumstance like this: let's say one application in a single directory is going to read two files from the disk (circumstancial again as they might already be in memory) and file A is at 25% data into the disk and file B is at 50% (because file B was modified), depending on how big the hard disk is, that is a big gap for the disk head to move.

Doing something like the above only has a circumstancial difference because the difference also relies whether a specific file has been cached into memory either at boot-up or from being read previously (or from Superfetch on Vista/7).

Whilst the default defragmenter in Vista/7 are good, other third-party defragmenters are more hardcore. The benefits over the basic defragmentation and basic free space consolidation are circumstancial and sometimes minimal. However, the best defragmenter is probably MyDefrag. I say this for a multitude of reasons after reading the FAQ and testing a number of other third-party defragmentation utilities (O&O, Diskeeper, PerfectDisk, Defraggler, etc). For example, PerfectDisk put the C:\Windows\WinSXS folder at the beginning of the disk (FAIL).