Hard Drive 55% fragmented. Problem?

Yes, regular Defrag does require some free space too and so all other programs.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

In nearly 25 years of using Windows I can honestly say I've NEVER found ANY SIGNIFICANT improvement with defragging HDD's.

However if you really insist --the BEST way of achieving a better result is to use MACRIUM to IMAGE your HDD, then delete / reformat the HDD and then restore the image. (Note --don't CLONE the HDD but IMAGE it). - Don't forget the system partition too when imaging the HDD.

This whole process will run a LOT faster than slow useless defragging processes and you will have a backup too !!!!!.

Free Macrium is probably used by about 60 - 70% of people on this forum who SENSIBLY take regular backups.

Cheers
jimbo

Right, that's how I feel about it too. One thing though, ever since W7 sp1 fragmentation of disks is very low, couple of percent maybe. I had 2 HDDs ever since than until I had to change them few month ago and they had 1 or 2% of fragmentation but I also had few HDDs coming from some other computers and were heavily fragged, practically 90% (don't know why or how) and good defragging with optimization helped them a lot. They were clanging and buzzing like crazy before defragging them. Did I mention that auto defrag is turned off ?

Good point, Jimbo and CountMIke! I also know some people who prefer to wipe a heavily fragmented disk and restore from a (non-image) backup because they observe that it lays all files out on disk sequentially (or least, as sequentially as running an OS, a file system, and all the background tasks will allow) as the restore proceeds.
--Ed--