HDDs: To frag or not to frag

I've been doing some research into the process of defragmentation on Windows 7 and found that the whole matter is largely based on individual preconceptions rather than anything scientific. There are those who believe that defragmentation provides little improvements in performance and need not be done more than every few months and even then only on the system disk. The other school of thought believes that one can never defragment their drives too often and prefer the use of defragmenting apps that run continuously when the system is idle (such as IObits Smart Defrag). Then there is the perhaps more important question of whether or not the process of defragmentation itself causes excessive wear on the physical disks, leading to a shortened lifespan versus the school of thought that believes that a good defragging app can monitor your file activity to work out which files you access most often and then rearrange them on your hard drives so as to eliminate excessive head seek activity, thereby saving wear and tear on the disks and extending the life of the dirve.

Soooooooo, which school of thought are you enrolled in and why?

 

I'm by no means an expert on the issue, but I'm on the side of regular defragmentation being a good practice on non-SSD type hard disks.

My feeling is a badly defragmented drive actually causes more wear and tear on a hard drive's components, then any wear caused by a regular defragmentation routine. I've been dealing with computers since 1997, and always defragmented my drives at least twice a month (more often if I'd added or deleted programs) under Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP . . . and I have rarely had a hard drive fail (and I have some old drives still in operation). Windows 7 does this automatically, and I no longer pay any attention to it. I'll still initiate a defragment if I install or remove a large program.

Again, this is just my opinion . . . I have no empirical data on this subject pro or con. I'm sure someone else will chime in with a totally different take on the subject.

 

Oh, I am quite sure they will. This seems to be a bit of a touchy subject for some. In any case, thank you for your input. I probably wouldn't even have started thinking of defragmentation schedules had my Windows Scheduler not crapped out on me, leaving me to mind for the disks.

 

Badly fragmented and ~25% free space on a HDD = performance hit + excess wear/head thrashing; the lower the % free space and/or the smaller the drive, the bigger the hit.

W7's auto defrag routine only runs when the PC would be otherwise idling.

If you have a modern large HDD with sub -50% drive space used, a monthly defrag would be fine.

Sweet spot:~ 2x drives, 128GB SSD for Windows + regularly used programs (keep ~25% free space) with 500GB+ HDD for data, media, documents, etc. The HDD will see much lower read/write activity than if it were also the System/Boot drive and defragging would be needed much less frequently provided 15%+ free space is kept.

 

So there IS an advantage to separating most of your data out onto a drive other than the system/boot disk. I've been trying to get that question answered for a long time. Just another reason to switch to a SSD. Thanks for the guidelines satrow.

 

OK, that's it. I'm crawling out of the dark ages and buying a SSD today, right now. Thanks MA.

 

Yea, I suspect the same thing could happen so I went out and bought some adult diapers, just in case Is there anything I can do with the HDD after swapping it out for the SSD (assuming I don't s*** on it)?

 

Gotta love SSDs:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ZxflL-9FLqo/Uq_LXMYl1qI/AAAAAAAADRA/Q6oA5hGXAr4/w752-h812-no/DiskSpeedTest.png

 

Thanks to all who have preached tirelessly about SSDs. Sometimes, hearing it for the 36th time is the charm :-o

 

Indeed.
http://photouploads.com/images/ssds.jpg

Defraging is important, but lot of people don't relies the speed to be gained simply by using a smaller partition on a larger HDD. If I don't need the space I always short stroke my drives. By setting up a partition just big enough for all of your files plus some breathing room you force all of your data onto the faster outer tracks of the drive. It makes for a noticeable difference in windows start up and anything access time dependent.

http://photouploads.com/images/shortstrok.jpg

 

Like...whoa.

I want mine that fast

Did you RAID them?

Nevermind, I can read

 

It should be added that even if you do need the space your whole drive provides you can get the same boot speed and OS speed benefits by making a smaller C: drive just for the OS and make a larger D: drive for storage. This limits the OS drive to the faster outer tracks and keeps your storage on the slower inner tracks. In this way you can have your cake and eat it. :cool

2x kingston hyperx SSDs in a raid 0. At windows 7 boot up the four colored dots that come together to form the windows logo don't have a chance to even touch before the desktop shows. :cool One trade off though, no trim. So I need to keep a good bit of free space on them for background garbage collection to work effectively. If I ever pass 50% capacity on the array read and write speeds start to fall off and are permanently that way till I format the array and re image (I keep a backup/OS image on a HDD to quickly reimage on occasion) Why it hurts read performance I donno.

 

That sucks.

Is TRIM not supported with RAID?

 

Nope. I think some intel drivers are supporting it when running the correct firmware and only on high end chipsets.

 

Thanks, that answers the exact question I had in mind. When my 1TB drive with 65 GB data might got to 10% fragmented I'd think "that doesn't seem too bad". But I always wondered two things First, is that 10% of my data or 10% of the total drive? (big difference) and 2. Where on the drive are all these fragmented files? Are they all on the outer rim or just scattered around the whole drive haphazardly? Knowing what I know about Microsoft, I imagined that the data was just strewn over the entire drive. And that's why I asked in another thread about the potential benefits of partitioning up a large HDD. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=282062

You answered both threads at one time. Thanks

 

I use MyDefrag myself. It has a very nice display that shows you exactly what files are where on the disk. It also has several options to move all data to the outer tracks (bottom of the display) of the drive and can even prioritize OS data over say music files.