Defragging a 2 Terabyte Drive

vgchat said:

Should we make a new thread for you two, since this is going offtopic? @jimbo45 & @CountMike

Hi there

No -- just a little bit of fun -- as there are loads of problems with this build !!!!!!

Cheers
jimbo

Helmut said:

Modern disc filing systems don't really need it, won't make any difference. Apart from that Windows 10 does it to a schedule. I set it to once per month. It does not get anything worse than a few percent with that. Weekly is more than enough.
I don't see any point in an alternative. Just more bloat doing very little.

I agree with that.

@Tegiro I have 3 Windows 10 computers, each one were originally Windows 7.
Here is a report of the Windows built in Optimize on one of them, the other 2 are the same.

Hi there
It's amazing how old habits die hard -- a lot of people are still questioning reliability of SSD's !!!!!! these days they are more likely to outlast any spinner.

Modern discs don't need defragging -- if you just think how fast the internal cache and RAM is of a modern computer and the fact that windows internal I/O handling routines are streets superior now to those of a few years ago there's nothing to be gained by defragging. In any case on modern mobos the HDD I/O controller is on a separate chip so I/O performance is always optimised as much as possible.

I/O is buffered and overlapped with other compute processes and given the speed of any decent disc drive you could have file chains all over the place and still hardly notice any diminution in performance. Windows also has "Pre-fetch" which is a complex algorithm. This tries to work out what you are likely to do on your machine via past usage -- it's often pretty good and what happens is that data is read into the machine before you actually need it so when you execute the application data is already in memory. This is often why after first installing Windows it takes a few re-boots often to make it "settle down" !!!.

Of course if you still have very poor slow discs on IDE interfaces then nothing will improve performance - defragging or not.

Cheers
jimbo

The defrag v. don't topic is just like the manual overprovision v. don't topic for SSDs. Some say you need it, some say you don't. Some say it helps, some say it won't, some say it will help so little it is not worth it.

This was my experience with HDD defragging in Windows 10: 99% of the time I just let Windows handle it in the background with default settings. The 1% of the time where I would interfere is if I noticed a degradation in performance on the computer and the HDD activity light was constantly going. Then I would look at disk optimization control panel and there would usually be a drive marked as needed optimization and I would just leave the computer on overnight and let Windows do it's thing on the drive, and all would be right in the world again.

Hi there
@Compumind

SSD's or whatever follows them are obviously the way to go -- but currently if you have several TB (even via aggregated HDD's) then big HDD's are still per byte loads cheaper.

Here on my NAS I have nearly 20 TB of HDD storage (4 HDD's in 2 RAID 0 arrays controlled via MDADM -- Linux software RAID).



Arrays composed like this : (disks dev/sdb, dev/sdc, /dev/sdd, /dev/sde equivalent in Windows terms to say "C: D: E: F:"

BTW unlike windows storage spaces which break easily Linux software RAID allows you to use HDD's of any capacity -- no need for equal size HDD's to build RAID arrays.




OK RAID 0 is a risk but I have backup and the speed is fantastic for HDD's -- I don't know what 20 TB of SSD storage would cost currently although eventually you are correct -- spinners will "go the way of the Dodo".

Cheers
jimbo