Defragging unmovable files

[LHammonds]

Such as the wear and tear caused by the defragging itself? :teehee:

What point are you trying to make here? Sounds like your purpose is to try and confuse people rather than help. 5 minutes to defrag (if that long) verses the drive being online and in use for months. Please.

 

LHammonds

[evilneko]

5 minutes perhaps on a system that is regularly defragged. How much does that add up to over the course of years? Many people don't defrag that often, so a defrag operation, even without any file sorting of the kind offered by more advanced defragging software, can take hours. Defragging is an intensive operation, far more so than normal usage due to the number of disk writes necessary.

 

And all for what? An imperceptible performance increase? Anything at all? I've yet to find an unbiased source showing the benefits (or lack) of defrag.

[ell46]

This sounds like it's down to personal choice rather than hard facts.

 

All I can say is my defrag takes less than 5 mins and I do notice a difference in performance when using my graphic programs and games if I don't do it and to me it seems logical that there is less wear and tear on the HD if it isn't having to constantly roam all over the discs to run a program because the files are fragmented and scattered.

 

LHammonds, thanks for that tip, that program sounds similar to Acronis, I should look into it more.

[LHammonds]

5 minutes perhaps on a system that is regularly defragged. How much does that add up to over the course of years? Many people don't defrag that often, so a defrag operation, even without any file sorting of the kind offered by more advanced defragging software, can take hours. Defragging is an intensive operation, far more so than normal usage due to the number of disk writes necessary.

True...it "can" take hours on an ancient system that has been online and never defragged for 5 years, has a huge drive that is near capacity...or uses the built-in version of defrag that comes with Windows XP and tries to use the PC while defragging...which usually resets its little brain each time the system performs a write (very irritating with that particular software). It completely depends on the machine as to how long it takes. Typically though, the older the machine and longer that machine takes to defrag, the easier it is to see performance gains afterwords.

 

And all for what? An imperceptible performance increase? Anything at all? I've yet to find an unbiased source showing the benefits (or lack) of defrag.

I won't argue your perception abilities as it is most-likely a no-win scenario. However, if there was not an actual benefit to defragmenting a hard drive, it wouldn't be recommended by so many people...such as Bethesda and myself. Yep, Bethesda mentions defragging your PC for performance reasons in Oblivion's own readme.txt. And yes, I have actually seen the performance of Oblivion improve because of defragmenting the drive (after installing Oblivion). How? Simply counting how many seconds it takes for Oblivion to load at the beginning before and after a system has been defragmented. On my old computer which was nearly 8 years old before it died, it took 60 seconds to load Oblivion. That is a long time to look at the load screen and it didn't really matter much if I started Oblivion for the 1st time when the PC was turned on or the 5th time (system caching did not help much due to my computer only having one gig of RAM...which is a vastly different scenario on my current system with 12GB...performance would have to be gauged after each reboot due to caching). So basically, I have witnessed 1st-hand with Oblivion loading faster and with less hard drive thrashing when the BSA files were arranged on the drive in a contiguous manner rather than being scattered about all over the drive. This particular example of better/faster performance from a PC is not confined to just my 8-year-old PC. I've seen system improvement on the hundreds of PCs that I've worked on over the course of 21 years that I have been in the business. And like I said before, the slower and more ancient the system, the easier it is to measure performance gains from defrag. A brand new PC today will see very little improvement using defrag and if the system has SSD drives, it is 100% wasted effort to defrag.

 

I mentioned that the defrag utility that comes with Windows can be very particular about PC usage while trying to defrag which can increase the amount of time "that" utility can take to finish (because it is fairly stupid...and more so the older the OS is). However, the end-result no matter which tool is used is the same. Check out this article for a method to defrag a system faster

 

LHammonds

[Paxan_1]

Hi,

i want to give some feedback after doing the boot process and the application optimization. For my system it has taken less than 5 minutes. I'm not really sure if my Windows startup is faster, i haven't taken the time. The thing i realized is my Firefox startup, this is as fast like in the beginning. I have lots of Addons and i think only to fasten up this on shows puran has done a good job. The next step is to take puran for my weekly defragmentation.

[TheTerminator2004]

Defragging is less useful in Windows Vista than Windows XP, and massively less so in Windows 7 (to the point where it's almost completely pointless). So if you have one of those operating systems (or Linux, which is efficient to the point where it IS completely pointless), you won't notice nearly as much benefit. This is partly because Windows 7 is much more efficient when it comes to handling the filesystem, and partly because it does a very good job of defragging while your PC is idle. So defragging won't take very long at all, and you won't notice much of a difference (though it is still good to do it occasionally, because unlike Linux, Windows 7 still isn't perfect in this regard).

 

For Windows XP or older, however, regular defragging is essential. Ideally, every time you install a big program, such as a game, you should defrag afterwards.

[Illiad86]

For Windows XP or older, however, regular defragging is essential. Ideally, every time you install a big program, such as a game, you should defrag afterwards.

 

Oh ya, I can relate to that...still on old Windows XP x64 Pro :wink: I have to defrag frequently, especially when TF2 has a big update or Steam for that matter. Also do it after I've installed a couple mods in Oblivion.

[ell46]

I'm running XP x64 and it needs regular defrags, I do use my PC a lot and always uninstalling, creating new files mostly graphics which are quite large and of course gaming.

[evilneko]

Three users of XP 64 (my desktop runs it) in the same place? Just one more shows up and we got the apocalypse going on! :teehee:

 

I maintain that I've never seen any real performance increase after defragging even on a slower system such as my previous desktop, a Sempron 3100 (1.7 GHz, IIRC, running Win 2k Server with 1.2 GB RAM). However, I've decided to take on LHammonds's challenge. I timed Fallout 3 launching (from clicking "Launch FOSE" in FOMM to the title card coming up) and loading a save game (from click to in-game) after a fresh boot. Tonight, I will use MyDefrag (the evolution of JkDefrag) set to sort by filename, the optimum sorting method for fast program launching. And if that's insufficient, I'll use a trial copy of PerfectDisk (hopefully it's not too crippled).

[LHammonds]

I'm interested to see your results. However, they would be completely skewed if you had ever run defrag on your drive after having installed FO3...but judging from your prior comments...you haven't run defrag on your PC. :thumbsup: