To defrag or not to defrag? (non-SSD)

pietcorus2 · 14 Sep 2018

It does not give you any progress by defragmenting HDDs , does not speed up external HDDs , only wears them out !
I only trim my SSDs , thats it..........

Geneo · 16 Sep 2018

pietcorus2 said:

My own experience...............

Well it was due to something else or you had a hard disk with bad sectors.

cereberus · 16 Sep 2018

pietcorus2 said:

Dont ever ( !) defrag HDDs with OS-backups on it ( Acronis, Macrium,Aomei , etc )...............Your backups could not function anymore !!

This is not true!

cereberus · 16 Sep 2018

People struggle with the 64MB concept.

Think of a 200 page book, and it takes 1 minute per page to read it. It will take 200 minutes to read the book.
Now imagine all the pages are scattered on the floor. Suppose it takes one minute to find next page, it will take 399 minutes to read the book.

Now suppose book is split into 4 pages of 50 pages each. It will take 203 minutes to read the book ie barely any difference to a complete book.

Whether 64MB fragments are truly optimal is hard to say but directionally it makes sense.

Penny K · 18 Sep 2018

alexncfc said:

My secondary drive in my system is a 2TB standard hard drive.
Is there any benefit in defragging these days?

IMHO ... Yes.
More importantly is short stroking your HDD for better performance, and lower fragmentation.
With a bit of knowledge about partitions, sizes and optimal locations on the disk, this will increase your performance substantially.

jimbo45 · 18 Sep 2018

Hi folks

I've never found defragging HDD's even from as far back as Windows 3.11 the slightest bit of use ever.

Your best bet -- > Image the disk with something like Macrium Free
delete partitions on the disk and reformat the disk you think needs defragging.
now restore image.

Job done much (by light years) faster and probably just as good. Especially for modern HDD's (7200 RPM / SATA and with decent cache size -- 128MB minimum these days). OK you won't get SSD performance but modern large SATA drives (especially 7200 RPM ones) are certainly OK for almost any tasks where you don't need the really extra performance of an SSD. Large Video / music files are a good example of what to have on these disks.

BTW with even a 250 GB SSD's costing as little as 40 EUR /GBP or around 43 USD - there's no excuse not to have your OS on an SSD. Once you've removed the OS from a standard HDD the whole defrag thing becomes irrelevant anyway.

Cheers
jimbo

cereberus · 18 Sep 2018

Penny K said:

IMHO ... Yes.
More importantly is short stroking your HDD for better performance, and lower fragmentation.
With a bit of knowledge about partitions, sizes and optimal locations on the disk, this will increase your performance substantially.

What! Short stroking is only of any minor use on the primary OS drive. Waste of time on a secondary drive. Far better to just use an SSD on primary drive as a minimum.

Anyway secondary drives tend to have static data so rarely get that fragmenyed much anyway.

Try3 · 18 Sep 2018

jimbo,

Bringing up Brexit is inappropriate in this forum.

Berton · 18 Sep 2018

Microsoft introduced their version of disk utilities back in MS-DOS 6 days, Windows 3.11 and earlier ran on top of DOS so things like defrag was done within DOS before Windows loaded. Windows 95 [1995] began the change to including the OS with the GUI/Graphical User Interface for consumers, Windows NT4 and 2000 started changing things for business/network uses. Back in those days use of tape backup systems required storing a catalog on the drive and bootable floppy disk such as Colorado Memory's backup but that could be recreated if the disks failed although it took some time, especially as the tape unit connected via the LPT/Parallel Port/Printer Port on the computer, mostly quite slow but then HDDs were 120MB through 540MB. It was a big day in early '95 when a small company in SE Montana ordered a 1GB drive from the shop I worked in for his Bulletin Board system. All that to say that lots has changed in less than 25 years and mostly what works for each user can be accepted or debunked by what works for any other users.

Bree · 18 Sep 2018

jimbo45 said:

Your best bet -- > Image the disk with something like Macrium Free
delete partitions on the disk and reformat the disk you think needs defragging.
now restore image.

Job done much (by light years) faster and probably just as good....

No, a Macrium image faithfully preserves the fragmentation of the original drive, as has been pointed out to you before...

NavyLCDR said:

Respectfully, it does not amount to the same thing, virtually or in reality. I used to think the same thing until I was shown that I was mistaken by @Bree:

Do I need to defrag the hard disk even if I format the hard disk Solved - Windows 10 Forums
....
So....the behavior Bree posted is correct. Restoring the partition without resizing is a sector by sector restore, not file by file, and no defragging occurs. So if you want to defrag during your restore, you have to shrink the partition when you restore it - then you can expand the restored partition back to it's original size after the restore is complete.

Best way to speed up PC? - Page 4 - Windows 10 Forums