Defragmenting Hard Drive

"Roland Schweiger" <> wrote in
news:hiso7a$67v$:

<SNIP>
> Defragmenting often will only wear out the heads of your
> HDD (same applies to frequent virus scans) and will not
> have much effect on the machine.

<SNIP>

> You also don't have to schedule, defrag will work in idle
> time.

OK, make up your mind - are you telling him to defrag "manually
and rarely" or set "auto defrag in background whenever possible"
as a default?

--
There are only two classifications of disk drives: Broken drives
and those that will break later.
- Chuck Armstrong (This one I think, http://www.cleanreg.com/,
not the ball player. But who knows. I can't remember where I got
the quote. But it's true.)

"thanatoid" <> wrote in message
news:Xns9D02EE3E05B86thanexit@188.40.43.245...

> set "auto defrag in background whenever possible"
> as a default?

AFAIK that IS the default - it certainly was in Vista...

"Gene E. Bloch" <> wrote in message
news:hitl59$7o8$...
> On 1/16/10, Allen posted:
>> LouB wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> Defragging will NOT wear out the heads. They do NOT touch anything.
>
>> Based on experiences with IBM 2300 series drives in the 1960s, you'll
>> sure know it if a head does touch the disc. Goodbye head, goodbye disc.
>> Those drives had removable disc packs and the greatest fear was that some
>> dust might settle on a disc surface while changing packs. And with 2311
>> packs holding 7.5 megabytes on 10 surfaces and 2314s holding 15 megabytes
>> on 20 surfaces, changing them was a constant activity. To make it worse.
>> it took 90 seconds for a drive to come to a stop and another 90 seconds
>> to come back up to speed, plus one to two minutes to actually change the
>> pack, every pack change resulted in four to five minutes lost time. And
>> yes, I did mean MEGAbytes.
>> Allen
>
> You can imagine how sorry I was to see that technology fading out of :-)

heh I remember it well

--
--
https://www.shop.helpforheroes.org.uk/

"Gordon" <> wrote in
news::

>
> "thanatoid" <> wrote in message
> news:Xns9D02EE3E05B86thanexit@188.40.43.245...
>
>> set "auto defrag in background whenever possible"
>> as a default?
>
> AFAIK that IS the default - it certainly was in Vista...

And we ALL know how good for the user ALL Microsoft defaults
are... But YOU can make a change, and then IT becomes the
default.

--
There are only two classifications of disk drives: Broken drives
and those that will break later.
- Chuck Armstrong (This one I think, http://www.cleanreg.com/,
not the ball player. But who knows. I can't remember where I got
the quote. But it's true.)

thanatoid <> wrote:
>"Gordon" <> wrote in
>news::
>> "thanatoid" <> wrote in message
>> news:Xns9D02EE3E05B86thanexit@188.40.43.245...
>>
>>> set "auto defrag in background whenever possible"
>>> as a default?
>>
>> AFAIK that IS the default - it certainly was in Vista...
>
>And we ALL know how good for the user ALL Microsoft defaults
>are... But YOU can make a change, and then IT becomes the
>default.


I concur with those who recommend not leaving that enabled in Task
Scheduler.

--
Joel Crump

"Joel" <> wrote in message
news:...
>
> I concur with those who recommend not leaving that enabled in Task
> Scheduler.
>

Why?

"Gordon" <> wrote:

>> I concur with those who recommend not leaving that enabled in Task
>> Scheduler.
>
>Why?


Well, frankly, I would never defrag an NTFS drive unless I had a
specific problem that would indicate doing so. Having it churn my
drive when I walk away for a few minutes, for the purpose of
defragging, is downright absurd.

--
Joel Crump

In article <hitb7g$m0q$>, d
says...
>
> "Peter" <> wrote in message
> news:Ask4n.27123$...
> > I was pleased to see that Win 7 had a built in schedulable disc
> > defragmenter.
> > Today I installed Ashampoo WinOptimiser 2010 and looked at it's defrga
> > option.
> > Windows says my C: drive is 4% fragmented but Ashampoo says it's 36%
> > fragmented which sounds very high on a 2 month old PC.
> >
> > Who do I believe??
>
> If you're using NTFS, ignore both. You're still living in Windows 98 and FAT
> 32 days.

Actually, NTFS disks do fragment and the fragmentation can cause a real
performance hit. If you work with servers or databases or large files
and also happen to do more than one thing concurrently you will FEEL the
difference.

--
You can't trust your best friends, your five senses, only the little
voice inside you that most civilians don't even hear -- Listen to that.
Trust yourself.
(remove 999 for proper email address)

"Peter" <> wrote in message
news:Ask4n.27123$...
>I was pleased to see that Win 7 had a built in schedulable disc
>defragmenter.
> Today I installed Ashampoo WinOptimiser 2010 and looked at it's defrga
> option.
> Windows says my C: drive is 4% fragmented but Ashampoo says it's 36%
> fragmented which sounds very high on a 2 month old PC.
>
> Who do I believe??

Well, Peter, you'd probably be best off assuming that Ashampoo knows what
they're doing. Just yesterday, a friend brought me his laptop HD, because
it had problems...Fraggler showed it to be 42% fragmented. If you add and
remove files a lot, it doesn't take all that long to get to that point.
Defrag on a regular basis, and it'll be no problem.

"Roland Schweiger" <> wrote in message
news:hiso7a$67v$...
> "Peter"
>
>> Who do I believe??
>
> If i remember correctly,. Windows will disgard fragments > 64 MB (which
> makes sense) and maybe your Ashampoo well also treat larger truncks als
> fragments ant therefore yealds to a different percentage.
>
> However, in my opinion defragmentation is nowadays not so important than
> it used to be in the past.
> Defragmenting often will only wear out the heads of your HDD (same applies
> to frequent virus scans) and will not have much effect on the machine.

Wear out the heads? My, aren't YOU the brilliant one. The heads do not
contact the disc, dummy. Worse, your "helpful info" is entirely incorrect,
and NOT what people looking for advice need.

> Only if you copy, move around, install/uninstall tonnes of software, then
> occasional defrag is useful.

If only you'd have said that it is especially important in such a case, you
wouldn't have come off as an entirely clueless newb.

> You also don't have to schedule, defrag will work in idle time.
>
> Again, don't take defrag too important.

Again with the misinformation. What's your problem?

> Besides, if you do a defrag, it is better to make a disk cleanup first,
> then chkdsk and then defrag.

Finally! This part, at least, is entirely true. Way to go, keep it up.