Disk Defragmenter app for spinning Disk?

LMiller7 · 15 Jan 2020

Over the years NTFS has shown itself to be quite resistant to fragmentation. Not resistant to being fragmented but to the consequences of fragmentation. It doesn't cause a real problem unless it reaches very high levels which is quite rare. I haven't used anything more than Windows built in defrag utility for a long time. Set the schedule and forget about it.

Edit: One thing you want to avoid is using multiple defrag utilities. Different utilities have different concepts of what optimum defrag results are so the last utility you use will waste much time undoing the actions of the one that ran before.

CountMike · 15 Jan 2020

LMiller7 said:

Over the years NTFS has shown itself to be quite resistant to fragmentation. Not resistant to being fragmented but to the consequences of fragmentation. It doesn't cause a real problem unless it reaches very high levels which is quite rare. I haven't used anything more than Windows built in defrag utility for a long time. Set the schedule and forget about it.

Edit: One thing you want to avoid is using multiple defrag utilities. Different utilities have different concepts of what optimum defrag results are so the last utility you use will waste much time undoing the actions of the one that ran before.

It's true that NTFS doesn't fragment drives(much), all my HDDs are several years old and newer been defraged.

Disk Defragmenter app for spinning Disk?-image.png

TairikuOkami · 15 Jan 2020

CountMike said:

It's true that NTFS doesn't fragment drives(much), all my HDDs are several years old and newer been defraged.

You might want to try some portable defragment utility and analyze, just for fun. Different software uses different algorithms. MS is like: Do not change it, if it is not broken, so they might not be using the best ones. All I can say, that Windows defragmenter can take hours to finish, 3rd party manage to do it within 5-10 mins.

CountMike · 15 Jan 2020

TairikuOkami said:

You might want to try some portable defragment utility and analyze, just for fun. Different software uses different algorithms. MS is like: Do not change it, if it is not broken, so they might not be using the best ones. All I can say, that Windows defragmenter can take hours to finish, 3rd party manage to do it within 5-10 mins.

Here's Disk Speedup with my worst drive.

TairikuOkami · 15 Jan 2020

Thanks, so I guess Windows defragmenter does a good job after all.

SIW2 · 15 Jan 2020

TairikuOkami said:

Thanks, so I guess Windows defragmenter does a good job after all. ;)

If it runs once a week or so, it seems to do a decent job. I use O&O because I have it. There are some extra nice features.

Disk Defragmenter app for spinning Disk?-o-odefragpro.jpg

CountMike · 15 Jan 2020

Even in Windows 95/98 with much slower disks and HW, it was considered tolerable to have up to 20% of fragmentation before it would have visible impact on disk and system speed. With today's HW and NTFS, couple of % can't have any calculable impact.
Some "fragmentation" in strategical places can even be a good thing. MS Office for instance used to leave some empty blocks at ends of data files so they could be expanded in continuous space without having to look for free space which would waste time reading and writing. Large data bases would be another example.

Compumind · 15 Jan 2020

camelia said:

I only trust suggestion of this forum, from real users...

Hi.

Just this - one and done:

Diskeeper for Physical Servers & PCs | Condusiv(R) Technologies

You can use it on both your HDD and future SSD (no, it does not defragment the SSD.)

Read and do the free trial for Home or Pro.

eLPuSHeR · 16 Jan 2020

Puran Defrag is free and it does its job but it's not one of the prettiest.

jimbo45 · 16 Jan 2020

Hi folks

Once you understand a bit how modern SATA devices work you will realize that disk defragging is totally unecessary and a complete waste of time -- these are NOT slow IDE devices.

1) Disk's have usually a decent cache in them so I/O is buffered -- buffering means collecting blocks of I/o, holding them until there's a nice large chunk and then performs a dedicated single I/O stream so the computer doesn't wait while the disk is hunting all over the place for "bits of file".

2) Windows internal I/O algorithms have been improved hugely so there's a lot more "overlap" between CPU and I/O processing --even better with those dedicated graphic data boards too.

3) Prefetch algorithms --this is based on decent A.I and improves after the first few boot ups on a new windows installation -- what this does is guess what you are likely to want next and while the computer is in an idle state it pre-reads that into a dedicated pre-fetch area - probably somewhere in the paging system.

There is utterly no point whatsoever defragging any SATA HDD on computers that are less than about 8 years old -- certainly not if you don't have IDE disks (those ones connected via those old grey thick 20 pin ribbon things).

Just image backup and restore if you are worried about HDD performance -- or just copy and restore a few of the files you think might be a problem --even file explorer is a useful tool to do that.

Cheers
jimbo