Fragmenters ?

Windows 7 says 0% fragmented, defraggler says 9% fragmented?, How can there be such a difference, as I understand it fragmenting puts all the files needed for a programme to run close together on the hard drive to enable quicker access so the programme can start quicker, so how can there be such a difference ?

If defragger is free they often say disk is more fragmented than it is..to get you to buy full version.
But at the end of the day 9% is nothing.
Best free one I have used is by auslogics.

Fragmentation on NTFS is mostly total bollocks!

Not an SSD is it?

Spectre said:

Not an SSD is it?

Click to expand...

SSD? Oh, bugger! Do NOT defrag!

Seriously, why should you ignore defrag on an NTFS drive? Simply, it will be fragmented, by design. Defragmenting will NOT improve performance unless your drive is really poor, performance-wise. The reason is that NTFS uses a variety of techniques to reduce the impact of fragmentation.

I assume fragmentation is understood?

Fully, if the files needed for a prog to run are spread around the disc it will take longer to run the prog as all the files have to be read, hence put these files together for quicker access, I have a acer 5742, not great, I whacked in 8 gig of memory and wasn't impressed by the results, next step would be a solid state hdd

parker13 said:

Fully, if the files needed for a prog to run are spread around the disc it will take longer to run the prog as all the files have to be read, hence put these files together for quicker access, I have a acer 5742, not great, I whacked in 8 gig of memory and wasn't impressed by the results, next step would be a solid state hdd

Click to expand...

First, NEVER defrag SSD. All it does is reduce the life of the drive. Second, if you use a filesystem such as NTFS defrag is a waste of time. In early filesystems, such as FAT, one or more tracks were reserved for the file allocation table (FAT), files occupied consecutive sectors (track divided into equal size blocks). When a block was exceeded the last part included a pointer to the next block. So, when reading a file, the OS followed the path of block to block.

NTFS doesn't do that. NTFS sweeps the disk, collects the blocks and reassembles them in memory. Thus, fragmentation is largely irrelevant as the file management system deals with this for you.

NTFS on desktops/laptops is the SAME filesystem used by MS servers. Ask a major IT shop how often they run a defrag tool. Pretty much never. Waste of time. The OS deals with it!

nonsense mate, I'm repairing towers, mainly laptops daily, repairing windows files, removing spyware, adware, maleware and so on, defragmenting, which often hasn't been done since purchase makes a HELL of a difference to start up time and performance, simple as.

Okay M8, hope you get well-paid

Hope you don't repair peoples computers and never defrag them

parker13 said:

Hope you don't repair peoples computers and never defrag them

Click to expand...

No M8, I only do NTFS and AD consultancy to Blue Chips like BP so know f*ck all me

That's what I figured, best not state defragging is useless and makes no difference to performance when you don't know what your talking about, nice bit of post clocking though......which, to be fair is pretty much all you do........

parker13 said:

That's what I figured, best not state defragging is useless and makes no difference to performance when you don't know what your talking about, nice bit of post clocking though......which, to be fair is pretty much all you do........

Click to expand...

Lol, okay. On the post-clocking point, why would I need to?

Think I'll leave this here: The Desktop Files: The Truth about Defragmentation (although, note the date not just the source)

But, yes. Never defrag an SSD. In fact, even though it's supposed to do it automatically, I manually turn off the background defrag that introduced in Vista and used in all kernel 6.x versions of Windows since.

little_pob said:

Think I'll leave this here: The Desktop Files: The Truth about Defragmentation (although, note the date not just the source)

But, yes. Never defrag an SSD. In fact, even though it's supposed to do it automatically, I manually turn off the background defrag that introduced in Vista and used in all kernel 6.x versions of Windows since.

Click to expand...

To summarise your link M8, if you have no idea why, don't defrag

Him Her said:

To summarise your link M8, if you have no idea why, don't defrag

Click to expand...

The TL;DR version would actually state the opposite...

However, this:

Him Her said:

... Defragmenting will NOT improve performance unless your drive is really poor, performance-wise...

Click to expand...

is something I have noticed.

Anecdotal story time

My old work computer - an LGA 775 socketed Celeron running XP, with 1GB RAM, and a 40GB HDD, which was shut down nightly - would require defragging once, maybe twice, a year. The only performance improvement was on boot speed; on one occasion going from 8+ mins to ~2. Programs within Windows started no faster.

The current work computer - an Intel G2020, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, but still XP and still shut down nightly - has no noticeable performance drop off with fragmented files. I.E. the once I've degfragged it since getting it, just after SP3 installed, there was no improvement on boot speed.

So whilst I would agree with you in general, your caveat isn't as irrelevent as you might think in the home environment. There are plenty of people with older machines or low capacity/performance boot HDDs, not to forget that the majority of laptop HDDs are 5400rpm.

parker13 said:

That's what I figured, best not state defragging is useless and makes no difference to performance when you don't know what your talking about, nice bit of post clocking though......which, to be fair is pretty much all you do........

Click to expand...

Have a read of this. In most situations, defrag does not make much difference and could potentially make performance worse if badly defrag'ed

The Desktop Files: The Truth about Defragmentation

oneman said:

Have a read of this. In most situations, defrag does not make much difference and could potentially make performance worse if badly defrag'ed

The Desktop Files: The Truth about Defragmentation

Click to expand...

To add to that, given the OP stated Windows 7, you could also read this article:

Disk Defragmentation ? Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

With regard to the difference in fragmentation reported, the most likely cause is in what the tools take into account. For example, by default Windows 7 doesn't consider files greater than 64Mb 'interesting'. It also defrags in the background unless you turn this function off or the system is not turned on at the scheduled time. Additionally, Windows 7 doesn't consider free space while defraggler often does.

Further, a fully contiguous system where all files are unfragmented and follow each other can run more slowly than a fragmented system (as @oneman suggests). The reason is because in this state the system starts fragmenting immediately after defragmentation. It is far better to use a tool, such as the one included in Windows 7, that not only defragments files but moves them to locations to optimise access and reduce the likelihood and impact of future fragmentation.

At the end of the article linked the important phrase is:

Best practices for using defragmentation in Windows 7 are simple – you do not need to do anything! Defragmentation is scheduled to automatically run periodically and in the background with minimal impact to foreground activity. This ensures that data on your hard disk drives is efficiently placed so the system can provide optimal responsiveness...

Click to expand...

oneman said:

Have a read of this. In most situations, defrag does not make much difference and could potentially make performance worse if badly defrag'ed

The Desktop Files: The Truth about Defragmentation

Click to expand...

Sorry, just realised that the link has already been posted.