Does Defraging Do Any Good?

Geico266

Geico266

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I've been running MS defraging for years every couple of days. I found a new defrag tool and ran it. It tells me the whole C drive is fragmented and it took 2 hours to clean it up.

Is there that much difference in defraging tools?

Does it do any good?
 
There are differences. One product used by folks that do a lot of flight simulation use this product. http://www.disktrix.com/


Does it do any good? Probably a pretty subjective question. I don't honestly know if you can really tell the difference or not. It has to do with how data is laid down in the drive and what the computer and drive have to do to find that data. If a file is spread all over the drive then the head has to be moved all over to read it in.
 
It helps some. It reduces data access times, and also saves wear and tear on the hard drive over the long run.

Other fragmentation problems that can cause a performance hit are Master File Table fragmentation and pagefile fragmentation. Windows doesn't have any native utility to fix either of these problems (well, I guess unless you want to count disabling the pagefile and letting Windows re-create it, which sometimes works for the pagefile), but third-party utilities are available.

-Rich
 
As noted above. For read-intensive applications like flight simulator defragging helps a lot towards making things smoother. But a solid-state disk does even more, and doesn't need (and shouldn't be) defragmented.
 
Defragging every couple of days seems excessive. Is it?
 
TMetzinger said:
As noted above. For read-intensive applications like flight simulator defragging helps a lot towards making things smoother. But a solid-state disk does even more, and doesn't need (and shouldn't be) defragmented.
Click to expand...

Yep yep, and prices just keep dropping.
 
I will tell you that on my office computer. Word was operating at a painfully slow pace. It took like 30 seconds for it to open a document. I defraged the computer and Wow!!! What a difference.
 
I defrag maybe twice a year, when things get slow. Yes it does make a difference. This is a Windows issue that has been there since DOS.

Other OS such as Mac and *nix don't see such a hit. I remember reading an article on what makes FAT and NTFS so susceptible but all I remember is MS could have done a better job designing their file system.

Joe
 
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