to defrag or not to defrag

[The Fallen One]

ok comp guys, i have a question for you, my computer has been acting a bit low for a while and i havent defrag-ed my hd for about 2-3 months, is it time to do it again or should i wait some more time? if so how long?

also one more question, what would happen if i defragment my hd alot?

[LennonCook]

Defrag as often or as little as you like. It can never hurt, it can often help. The main effect of dedragging alot, is that defrags take less time. Also, it can help other programs. Depending on the size of your harddrive, the first defrag in 2 - 3 months could take anywhere from an hour or two, to about a year, and some people will for this exact reason tell you that you can be better off formatting.

[Assassin]

Originally posted by LennonCook: Depending on the size of your harddrive, the first defrag in 2 - 3 months could take anywhere from an hour or two, to about a year...

Wait a second... A year defragmenting? [img]redface.gif[/img] Hot darn. My last one took 8 hours for a 37 gig hard drive... And that was with a 6 month time gap between the last one.

My suggestion is to defrag as often as you like/want, like LennonCook said. The more often you defrag, the less time it will take.

[ 07-23-2004, 10:55 PM: Message edited by: Assassin ]

[Sythe]

A year of defragmenting! You're joking right? [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

[SecretMaster]

Well, I have a story of defragmentation. It wasn't done in a long time, it took like a day and half. Well... mainly cause it froze like two times but still.

[Firestormalpha]

My record stands at 3 months since last, 2.4 ghz pentium4 40 gig hard drive. Took 15 minutes to defrag. I believe the amount of space used factors in as well. Seeing as how mine never seems to surpass 30% of it's space taken up. It only takes a little while. If you use a large portion of the drive, that's more data to move around and therefore longer defrag.

[Zero Alpha]

actually the main factor in defrag speed is what version of windows you are using. windows 2000 is much much better than 98, and xp is better than 2000. the size of disk is also a factor, but not as much as the virsion of windows.
amount on the disk is a factor, but only in that there is less to defragment. as long as there is 15% space free, no differece is noticed.

also, i always recommend everone to defragment either once a week, or once a month. how often you defrag should depends on how many writes go to the disk. ie, i have a long term storage drive that i never need to defrag, and when i do it takes like 30 sec. my C drive takes about 5 mins however, because it is the one that gets things written to it.

[ 07-24-2004, 06:29 AM: Message edited by: Zero Alpha ]

[JrKASperov]

Defrag over night, and make sure you disable all screensavers and standby thingies!

[RoSs_bg2_rox]

That is also a factor, but if you have an organised file system you shouldn't need to defrag a lot. An effective way to stay organised and minimise defragging is setup partitions.Here is an example:

Setup 3 partitions:

Partition 1

Contains Windows, program files and smaller data files. Once installed, these are not changed that frequently, apart from updates, and the changes that are made are not normally so significant as to adversely affect disk performance. This partition will benefit from occasional defragmentation

Partition 2

Large, infrequently modified data files-such as movies and mp3's. The size of this partition is likely to be the largest on your HDD-in my case it occupies nearly 70percent of my total disk space. The files on here are so large and infrequently modified that there is very little gain in defragmentation However leaving them on partition 1 can really slow down the defragmentation process.

Partition 3

I use this one to hold my pagefile, internet cache, temp files, downloads and so on.
This partition is especially useful if you use file-sharing programs, which are notorious for really chewing up your nicely defragmented drive. The benefit or keeping this drive separate is twofold. First, it keeps these rapidly changing files (some of which can be very large, such as partially downloaded moveis) away from other more organised partitions.
Second, this drive does not need to be defragmented at all. I know that may sound a little strange, but if you clar out your cache every now and then, move your completed downloads to other partitions and so on, the actual defragmented data is simply removed from the partition (and during the copying is nicely reorganised.)

[RoSs_bg2_rox]

oh yeh and another thing, when defragmenting, make sure you do as JrKASperov says, also shut down all programs, or, you can run defrag in safe mode if you are not sure about what to disable etc.