Defragmenting, worth it?

[PowerMacG5]

I was wondering if defragging my HDD is really worth it. I have read numerous things online that say that defragmenting doesn't help newer computers. Is this true?

 

[Dre]

defragmenting helps a lot!

 

[richleader]

It helps to defragment your drive once after installation to move used blocks to the outer portions of the hard disk to optimize speed in your OS and staple apps. After that, once every few months or even six months is typically fine.

 

[Miramonti]

Defragging is about efficiency. It reorganizes files on your harddrive as well as reconnects single files that may be broken and scattered on your hd (large files). Depending on the method you use (and options provided by defragging software), you can organize the files by name so that the related files are closer to each other making the hd response time quicker when the hd is looking for/reading them. If you install/uninstall things often its very valuable. If you just open word documents, etc. its not necessary to do often.

When you defrag, you usually get a visual display of location of the files on the platter and it also tells you how many files are fragmented into different parts as well, so this is the best indication of how often each person needs to defrag their drives.

 

[PowerMacG5]

Okay, so which do you think works better with Windows XP, the built in defragmenting utility, or Norton Speed Disk. When I use the built in utility, it always moves the files to the front of the drive, but sometimes when I use Speed Disk it makes a huge blank area in front on the disk, and then puts all of the files after that.

 

[richleader]

That blank area is for your swap file. It will work better if you go into your system performance tab and change it to a fixed size swap file rather than a variable size one as the defrag program will know exactly how much space to leave for it. Norton puts it on the very outside of the hard drive cylinders where they spin the fastest for optimum (supposedly) performance.

 

[Miramonti]

Someone may want to refute me on the but Norton speeddisk was horrible when I used in in Win2k - I mean it made it noticeably miserable. I'd use the built-in one in XP over norton, but you try them both.

I use O&O defrag, others like Diskkeeper too.

 

[wyvrn]

Defrag is a must for FAT and FAT32 drives. I have seen pcs come to a crawl running Win9X on a heavily fragmented drive. I almost always run scandisk and defrag on every one of my customer's computers before I leave (after running disk cleanup first), it just makes a big difference when it has never been done. Generally on NTFS drives though, defrag makes less signigicant difference.

 

[PowerMacG5]

Thanks, wyvrn. That's the answer I was looking for. I am running Windows XP Pro, on an NTFS partition. I read that with an NTFS partition, it doesn;t help that much to constantly defragment a hard drive like it did in prior version.

 

[RatedR]

Originally posted by: KraziKid
Okay, so which do you think works better with Windows XP, the built in defragmenting utility, or Norton Speed Disk. When I use the built in utility, it always moves the files to the front of the drive, but sometimes when I use Speed Disk it makes a huge blank area in front on the disk, and then puts all of the files after that.

I'd go w/ the WindowsXP version.

 

[JellyBaby]

The default XP defragger is so slow it's useless for large drives. On my 120 GB JB it was only 20% done after 9 hours. Norton Speed Disk took far less time.

 

[PowerMacG5]

On my 100 GB Western Digital (Not the special edition, mine only has the 2 mb cache), the built in defragger takes about 30 when it is very fragmented. When I just do it casually it takes about 1-2 minutes.

 

[mk]

Originally posted by: JellyBaby
The default XP defragger is so slow it's useless for large drives. On my 120 GB JB it was only 20% done after 9 hours.

That's very strange. My 80 gig Maxtor gets defragged in less than an hour with XP. I do however run it usually at least once/month (it was a "have to do whenever possible to keep the OS from totally bogging down" thing with Win9x's), sometimes more often if I've been moving stuff around a lot.
But to answer the original question I haven't noticed a difference in performance between a slightly fragged drive/partition/... and a newly defragged one.

 

[crisp82]

I run 98se and have a constant need to defrag otherwise I have a slow, sluggish response. It makes a big difference, allowing apps to open faster and be more stable. I would recommend that you do it around once every 3/4 months under XP.

 

[Chooco]

i run a game server on this machine, it's XP Home with NTFS.

the only time my computer shuts off is when it crashes. after defragging, the game server was much more stable and the general idle CPU usage went down by 20% or so (from about 27 to about 5).
w00t go defrag

 

[Mavrick007]

Defragging is still not a bad idea cause it will free up blocks and position groups together better so that file access will be optimal, but it doesn't matter as much as with the Win9x systems out there. If you want to try a good defragger, pick up a trial version of Diskkeeper and see if you like that. Someone else mentioned it and I like it alot cause it does the job and it's pretty fast.

 

[CZroe]

Practice restraint when defragging. I knew someone who defragmented his RAID setup twice a week and wore out the drives in a few months. I myself have worn out some older drives by defragmenting too much.