Defragmentation?

[joddington]

Could someone explain what 'DEFRAGMENT YOUR HARDWARE means please? Does it help to run a computer faster? I do not know much about computers anyway, and how is it done and can I do this myself without doing other damage , do I need an expert? Do I need to do it at all? Thankyou for your patience, anything other than updating and I am technically baffled.

[ladybirder]

It's easy. Your computer is probably set to do it automatically every so often.

[rsvp]

I'm probably on a par with you joddington in computer knowledge! You'll get great help from the boofs on here. My understanding of defraffing is that it tidies up your files. On my system - windows XP I open all programmes, go to systems tools and click on defrag. No doubt someone else far more knowledgeable than me will explain better.

[Nibble]

Check through Start-Control Panel-System Tools-Defragment, select C: drive, then run Defragment. The program will run and bring back a report, of which a level of <6% means your PC is runningfine. It will also move your frequently used programs to the start of the drive, meaning they'll run faster, and it'll speed up the system on your PC. You should consider running this program every 1-2 months, depending on how many new folders/files & programs change over time.

[MarkRae]

Before a computer storage device such as a hard disk can be used, it needs to be formatted. Basically, this divides it up into many tiny areas. When the operating system saves a file to the storage device, it uses as many of these tiny areas as it needs and, for a large file, this may mean hundreds or even thousands of them. A special area of the storage device is used to keep a record of which of these tiny areas contain the file's data.

Now, when you next need to read the file, the operating system interrogates this reserved area to see where the file is stored, retrieves the data from the various tiny areas and then stitches the file back together in memory.

So far, so good.

Now, let's say you delete the file because you no longer need it. What many people don't realise is that the tiny areas which contain the data of the file you're deleting don't get wiped - they just get flagged as empty in the reserved area. This is how undelete utilities work.

Next time you come to save a file, it can use some of these tiny areas flagged as empty, but may need many more of them because the second file is much bigger than the one which has just been deleted. This means that, over time, the files stored on the storage device are not held in adjacent (or "contiguous", to use the parlance) tiny areas. This can lead to a degradation in performance because the mechanism which reads the data off the storage device needs to jump all over the place to find the individual bits of the file it's trying to retrieve.

Defragmenting is intended to correct this and, as its name suggests, rearranges files so that they are stored in contiguous tiny areas of the disk, thereby giving the retrieval mechanism less work to do.

That's the theory, anyway! It's valid for certain types of formatting only. The vast majority of computers which run Windows use NTFS formatting of their hard disks. Fragmentation is built into the NTFS technology. You can run your defrag utility as often as you like - as soon as it finishes, the disk will fragment again, so you may as well not bother.

[SlackAlice]

good answer from MarkRae ^^^
He types faster than me and made it more understandable than I could.

[sidkid]

Agree with Mark on this (the last paragraph especially). I've read that its best not to bother defragging in many different articles on the subject. I wonder also if the defrag process (many read/writes involved) actually harms/shortens the life of the drive?

[Mattk]

The simplest way I've heard it explained is to think of your hard drive like a supermarket car park with the cars (information) dotted all over the show.
Now move all the cars to one end of the car park. That is de fragging.

[sidkid]

Yes but you turn your back and within minutes someone has moved them all over the place again :-)

[VHG]

And defragging will not make you PC go any faster (or if it does it will be by so little you will hardly notice)

[MarkRae]

> I wonder also if the defrag process (many read/writes involved) actually harms/shortens the life of the drive?

That's a very good question. All platter-based storage devices (as opposed to the newer solid state ones) have a "mean time before failure" rating based on likely usage. I could certainly envisage that constant defragging might reduce this because, as you've said, it's totally unnecessary disk usage.

[ChuckFickens]

It would be even worse for SSD devices (and even more pointless due to wear levelling on SSD devices)

Never defrag or do a full format on a SSD devices (quick format only), it will significantly reduce the reliable life span of the device.

[MarkRae]

Indeed. Windows 7 seems to understand all that, and does not configure SSD devices as part of the default weekly defrag schedule.

AAMOI, I have an SSD as the C: drive in my main development machine. It's faster than a SATA drive though, depending on what you mainly use your machine for, may not be vastly noticeable. Intensive database operations are unbelievably fast, so I could imagine that these devices would speed up something like a dedicated SQL Server machine by an enormous amount.

They're still relatively expensive, though, so may not be value for money for home users...

[ChuckFickens]

With some of the hard drive prices at the moment (due to the factories being turned into swimming pools) SSDs are looking much more viable price wise. I've recently had to buy 48TB of hard drive for a SAN and I'm so glad it was just before the flooding in Thailand as the cost would have been 3-4 times as much two weeks later!