What's new

I.. am a defragmenting-whore (1 Viewer)

Wayne Bundrick

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 17, 1999
Messages
2,358
Diskeeper bogs down the system and the Explorer shell becomes non-responsive when it's working on a large file. If you've got VCD, VOB, or HDTV sized MPEG files on your drive, look out. That's why I have Diskeeper set for screensaver mode instead of Smart Scheduling.

I always do a manual defrag after deleting a lot of files and installing or uninstalling big programs. That's when it makes the most difference.
 

John*K

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Oct 20, 2001
Messages
145
Although I haven't noticed a performance benefit, I have read that defragging does improve performance. I use O&O defrag. It offers a lot of different kinds of defrag options. I have read that XP comes bundled with a "Diskkeeper Lite".

Generally, I don't like to do it too often, as my drives tend to get kind of hot. It seems like doing it to often will increase the wear, but I could be wrong.
 

Chet_F

Supporting Actor
Joined
Mar 1, 2002
Messages
776
I tried once but the spork wouldn't fit in the hole of the hard drive.:D

But seriously John*k you are exactly right. Although defraging your hard drive may increase performance, the daily defrag of the hard drive is unneccessary wear and tear. But then again the argument can be made that after you have defraged, the hard drive takes less time to access the data and therefore less wear and tear. Sounds like a good study for someone that has NO hobby.
 

Wayne Bundrick

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 17, 1999
Messages
2,358
Wear and tear? I don't think so. If you find a bad sector on the drive during a defrag session, then I don't think that frequent defragging caused it to happen, I think it was going to happen anyway and the defrag program just happened to be the first to discover the bad sector. But when do you want a bad sector, if it ever occurs, to be discovered? Right away, or later?

Furthermore, a good defragger will have less work to do the more often it runs, and more work to do the less often it runs. So the wear and tear should more or less balance out. But a bad defragger moves all your furniture out into the yard to shampoo the carpet and then moves it all back in, and it does this every time no matter how often you run it.

Also, when you're running a busy server or just doing a lot of different things at once on the desktop, the hard drive's armature is going to be jumping all over the place to service multiple random requests, and that doesn't look all that much different from defrag activity.
 

Mike Fassler

Supporting Actor
Joined
Jan 17, 2004
Messages
523
with windows XP is doesnt matter if you defrag or not, your just killin your harddrive defragin so much.
alos as a guy who worksd in the computer industry i will tell ya to at least stay away from diskkeeper, iv ehad and seen it cause a ton of problems, mainly after usin it for a while the drive becomes very sluggish, if your uding winxp i recommend 0&0 or perfectdisk.
 

Wayne Bundrick

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 17, 1999
Messages
2,358
I've been using Diskeeper since version 1.0 running on Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. I've never lost data or had a sluggishness problem with the dozen workstations and half a dozen servers in my office that are running Diskeeper. Just the nonresponsiveness when it's moving a very large file, and that goes away as soon as it is done working on that file.

And Windows XP definitely needs to be defragged. NTFS not only can become fragmented, it does so readily. It's practically self-fragmenting. The fragmentation begins while Windows is installing and from there it only gets worse. Take a look at the Diskeeper disk map, or the map of any other defrag program (but not the defrag that comes with Windows XP because it isn't detailed enough), on a brand new Windows XP install and you'll see what I mean. Files will be scattered all over the drive with a gap of free space between every file, which will cause many file fragments as the drive begins to fill up.
 

Will_B

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2001
Messages
4,730
My name is Will and I liked defragging my Win98 machine.

(Hi, Will!)

I really, honestly thought (and still think) that the full screen defrag screen, where the horizontal lines are only a pixel tall, are a work of art.

I can imagine a gallery of white rooms and on each wall only large flat panels, each showing a hard drive slowly defragging... the lines slowly turning from blue to green, white space opening up, so slowly transforming that it almost seems like nothing productive is happening at all for a couple hours, until suddently you wake up and realize that a masterful process has nearly completed lining up every bit. It's like a flower blooming.

I say "wake up" because I tended to run this at night, and every once and awhile I'd wake up and peek at it. Over time I came to really appreciate it. I don't know if it is cubism or what, but it is something.

Sadly, the thrill is gone now that I have Win XP Media Ctr. The defrag screen looks nothing like Win98s - it is just a couple horizontal bars, and it takes only a few minutes to defrag the whole thing. I can't picture that on the wall of an art gallery.
 

James T

Screenwriter
Joined
Aug 8, 1999
Messages
1,643
I used to defrag a lot, espescially with my 486, running DOS 6.22 and win 3.1. I would defrag anytime I would delete or install anything. Then I upgraded to Win95 and the defrag took less time. So out of curiosity, I loaded up Defrag from a DOS 6.22 disk. As soon as Defrag loaded and showed me that all the files were fragmented(even after a Win95 defrag), I quickly ran DOS defarg. Big mistake. Since Win95 supports long file names, it screwed up every file and folder on my PC. Files weren't getting read because instead of searching for "Program Files", it was unable to find it because it was renamed to "Progra~1". Simple solution, I formatted my HD. I used to do that a lot too(almost once a month).
 

Bill Slack

Supporting Actor
Joined
Mar 16, 1999
Messages
837
I defrag every day at like 4am, iirc. Things are running smoothly, and it keeps my PVR software (SnapStream; it's good stuff!) much happier.

I just use the command line defragger in WinXP + the scheduling agent. Not as fancy as some of you, but it works for me.

Will_B:


:b Amen!
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Forum statistics

Threads
356,810
Messages
5,123,599
Members
144,184
Latest member
H-508
Recent bookmarks
1
Top