Largest/Longest defrag ever?

[The Mouth]

Whats your largest and longest?

I bring this up because after months and months of not doing so I finally decided to download Defraggler and CCleaner because my computers performance was becoming horrible; and well apparently I'm now defragmenting 45,719 files... Thats 156.1 GB and it will take an entire day to complete

[paradamed]

I think windows 7 defrags the drives automatically so I never done it since windows 7.

[irishron]

Even with Win 7, I defrag. Microsoft's idea of an automatic defraggger leaves a lot to be desired. I use free one from www.iobit.com.

[Jaketh]

I used to use this which is a pretty good defragger. I've been lazy and have been letting windows do it for awhile now however.

[Timefool]

I've never defragmented my computer and its going on 6 years now. MyDefrag says I have about 100GB of fragmented files, which is 25% of my entire hard drive lol.

[Jaketh]

I've never defragmented my computer and its going on 6 years now. MyDefrag says I have about 100GB of fragmented files, which is 25% of my entire hard drive lol.

You should probably do that

[irishron]

I've never defragmented my computer and its going on 6 years now. MyDefrag says I have about 100GB of fragmented files, which is 25% of my entire hard drive lol.

The last time I had a harddrive like that, it took over six hours.

[Timefool]

3 Hours to defrag and then 3 hours to manually remove a few hundred gigabytes of games I don't play anymore; would have been faster if I did it in reverse . And thanks Jaketh MyDefrag worked alot better than the one that comes with Windows (it doesn't even tell you how long is left or how fragmented it is lol).

[Agamemnon]

The last time I tried to defrag my comp it told me it would take 12 hours, so I gave up on it. That was last year.

[AqD]

It'd not be much better even after defrag.

Just Get a SSD. Everyone needs SSD!

[irishron]

It'd not be much better even after defrag.

Just Get a SSD. Everyone needs SSD!

If you're buying, I'll take one. Otherwise, can't affford what would be a luxury on my budget.

[Squid]

SSDs suffer the same performance hits from a badly fragmented drive as regular HDs.

[AqD]

SSDs suffer the same performance hits from a badly fragmented drive as regular HDs.

No they don't. SSD = flash memory disk. Fragmentation or continous file allocation are meaningless to them.


Most defrag apps actually detect SSDs and disallow you to defrag them, because it'd help nothing but shorten their life.

[Ishan]

No they don't. SSD = flash memory disk. Fragmentation or continous file allocation are meaningless to them.


Most defrag apps actually detect SSDs and disallow you to defrag them, because it'd help nothing but shorten their life.

True.

There is no benefit to reading data sequentially (beyond typical FS block sizes), making fragmentation irrelevant for SSDs. Defragmentation would cause wear by making additional writes of the NAND flash cells, which have a limited cycle life.

Wiki

Just make sure TRIM is enabled on your SSD and then you don't have to worry about such nonsense and never defrag your SSD, like aqd said earlier, it's completely stupid do so.

Moreover defragmentation of a SSD drive is a complete waste of time. Even if the data appears to be arranged sequentially according to our operating system, it's still logically mapped in random places internally by SSD's firmware due to write amplification, wear leveling etc. We're just moving sectors from one random location to another random location. Even when it looks sequential in windows after a defrag, internally behind the SSD NAND controller its still just as physically fragmented in the flash chips as it ever was.

TRIM info allows the controller to do maintenance stuff which improves performance similarly to defragging so that's all that it needs.

[Agamemnon]

^ What Ron said.

[Bolkonsky]

SSD's can get fragmented, it's just that it won't slow them down since it's, well, solid state. Everything can already be accessed at the same time.

[Squid]

Yes and no. Each read can only grab so much data, so if all the data is together you require fewer reads. So while on an SSD you won't have slowdown due to the moving of the mechanical arms to get to where the data is located on the disk, you will still get slow downs from having to do additional reads because the data is not contiguous. The slow down just won't be as pronounced as on a non-SSD, due to faster read times and no mechanical movement between reads required.

[Bolkonsky]

Yes and no. Each read can only grab so much data, so if all the data is together you require fewer reads. So while on an SSD you won't have slowdown due to the moving of the mechanical arms to get to where the data is located on the disk, you will still get slow downs from having to do additional reads because the data is not contiguous. The slow down just won't be as pronounced as on a non-SSD, due to faster read times and no mechanical movement between reads required.

SandForce can grab 500mb+ per second, and random read speeds of 80k+ IOPS so there's really no point. Aside from sequential reads, the entire purpose of defrag is to move data to the outer edge of the drive so the mechanical arm can access it more quickly, but there is no arm in flash memory as it's all instantly accessible. You may still have fragmented data, but SSD speeds are more than fast enough to make up for any type of performance loss.

[Squid]

SandForce can grab 500mb+ per second, and random read speeds of 80k+ IOPS so there's really no point. Aside from sequential reads, the entire purpose of defrag is to move data to the outer edge of the drive so the mechanical arm can access it more quickly, but there is no arm in flash memory as it's all instantly accessible. You may still have fragmented data, but SSD speeds are more than fast enough to make up for any type of performance loss.

The term fragmented data for an SSD is slightly different, or at least should be, than for a standard HD. For an SSD it does not require contiguous data that is closer to the "edge" because there is not edge and the SSD can read equally as quickly from where ever on the drive . . . but you'll get better performance if your data is organized into blocks that are the size of the data channel. Assume that you get 500MB per second read and 50,000 actual read operations to get that 500MB, this gives a data channel of 10K, or you drive read 10K per read operation.

The most efficient, and fastest is to have all your data fit into 10K blocks. Say you have 30K of data that needs to be read, if its split into 10K blocks (i.e. not fragmented) then it takes 3 reads, if the data is split into 5K blocks it takes 6 reads and you've doubled your read time for the same data. Whatever improvements in speed that SSD give, the hard drive, whether solid state or not, is still the slowest pieces of hardware and biggest bottleneck in any system, so not trying to optimize the storage of data on your hard drive seems rather foolish. As for the argument that it shortens the life expectancy of your drive, defragmenting a regular drive shortens its life expectancy as well since every time you use the mechanical arms of the drive you're bringing it closer to dying.

[The King in the North]

20 hours if I recall correctly. How much was defragged, I do not remember.