Quick way to defrag?
Community Forums/General Help/Quick way to defrag?
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| It occured to me, whilst watching my defrag application, wouldn't it be quicker to copy all the files to another hard disc, format the HD, then copy them back again? Is there any difference? (I refer here to a HD with no windows installation) |
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| Sometimes yes and no. I would say that depends on how may files there is and the size of the drive. |
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| The best approach is a real-time defragmenter. It will keep all your files unfragmented in the background which means that you never have to defrag. Also, defraging more often decreases the time. It is recommended that software developers defrag once a week (or more). |
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| It is recommended that software developers defrag once a week (or more). Recommended by who? Where? |
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| Quickest and most reliable way to defrag? Dont use windows defrag!!!(at least for heavily mutilated data areas) There are much better defraggers out there that defrag quicker (ok, its not when windows is -running- which might ruin your day) but are more reliable because you do not have to run them 3 or 4 times!!! -The ones on UBD (ultimate boot disk) do quite a good job. Personally i prefer not to use dodgy old NTFS at all, but i know, we sometimes HAVE to. If windows switched to the unix filesystem (EXT3/4) defragging would become much less of an issue. |
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| PS: I tend to reccommend my clients defrag about once a month (using the windows one). You dont need more (or less) than that. However for those awesome never-defragged-in-years "rainbow" disks, i use UBD. |
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| @Gfk - By Smart Computing Magazine. They also say advanced user every 2 weeks and normal users should do it every month. |
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| I've never defragged any of my hard drives and they run fine (5 years - laptop, 1 year desktop). But I've never come close to filling them to their capacity either. Desktop has 350GB drive of which I've filled maybe 20GB, Laptop has 80GB drive of which I've only ever filled about 40-50GB. |
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| Recommended by who? Where? I'm pretty sure that Vista and Windows 7 have an automated scheduled task enabled by default that defrags the HD in the background once a week, in low-priority mode. (Which is one of the reasons that Vista appeared slow to many people, because for the first day their HD is getting hammered in the background) |
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| wouldn't it be quicker to copy all the files to another hard disc, format the HD, then copy them back again? Is there any difference? Doing it that way should be SLOWER, since you'll still have to read and write every single file, plus wait for the format to be complete. When you do a defrag it'll only move around the files that are actually fragmented. The best way to cut down on your defrag times is to run it somewhat frequently, so there's not as much of a mess to clean up. |
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| Defraggler, from the makers of CCleaner. Use it and do not look back. It's fast anyway, but the really, really nice thing is that it lets you defrag files on an individual basis if you so desire, meaning that you can just take ten seconds to go over your frequently-accessed documents and ignore huge files in only two fragments, or enormous system archives that'll refragment themselves in an hour anyway as they auto-update, or anything else you can't be bothered to wait for. And it's free. Also, use CCleaner first to make sure there's less to defrag in the first place. Also free. |
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| Of course, if Microsoft actually fixed the underlying issue, then we wouldn't have threads like this in the first place... Just a thought. |
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| Indeed :) Ok, my drive is like 80 GB, it's practically fully (maybe about 72 GB used) I really should run the degraggeer more often, but meh. It's an extremely fragmented drive though. I think i'll go with just copying eventhing across to another HD and get myself a defrag app (not the windows one) Thanks guys (I will check that out Yasha!). |
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| There's also Sysinternal's Contig.exe , which is a command line tool that you can run on either specific files, or recursively across a folder / drive to selectively defragment certain files (or everything, of course) |
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| Nice tip with Defraggler. Been using CCleaner for years and recently discovered Speccy, but didn't realise they were from the same company and/or they had any other apps available. Ta. :o) |
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| Yeah, , Piriform's Defraggr is handy because it allows for udividual file / folder defragging! Provided you're not doing anything else to the drive when copying the files back, (I would also turn off system restiore, MS Shadowing and the indexing service for that particular partition just to make sure!) Then copying back will copy the files in an ordered state, only if there's a real lot of them it can take some time and exlorer sucks up resources available slowing your PC way down. |
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| I'm using Auslogic Disk Defrag also free. But I will test Defraggler - as I'm a CCleaner user. Thanks for the info |
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| just took 18 hours to defrag my wifes laptop, similar spec to yours, 74GBytes, took for every to tip it to the point where ut'd 16 percent free so the MSaft defrag would even start. Thanks for the alternatives! |
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| *coughMACINTOSHcough* |
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| *coughMACINTOSHcough* And then what? Disks get fragmented on the mac too, they aren't magic. It may be a slower process due to way HPFS operates, but there will be fragmentation nonetheless, especially if your disks don't have much free space. |
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| And then what? Disks get fragmented on the mac too, they aren't magic. It may be a slower process due to way HPFS operates, but there will be fragmentation nonetheless, especially if your disks don't have much free space. HFS+ in OS X does a fairly good job as I've heard. The same is true for most current *nix filesystems. Compared to them, NTFS with its HPFS base is ancient technology. In any case, keeping at least 20% free space helps a lot. |
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| Dynamically pumping page file is the root of all evil. Setting it to fixed size does mostly the trick. I usually run defrag only once or twice a year, and even then rarely out of real need. |
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| *coughMACINTOSHcough* They are a lot faster in defragging because : 1. Hardrive sizes are mostly smaller when buying a new Mac. 2. There is less software available to fill your harddrive with. 3. Harddrives get defragged when installing a new Application on Mac. (Point 3 is something I noticed when I was working at the Apple helpdesk when installing new software from Apple on iMac G4 I worked on, the rest of my points shouldn't be taken too serious XD) |
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