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10/15/2006 11:30:48 PM · #1 |
Anyone use Diskeeper to defrag your hardrive?
I havent defragged in over a year, and I have always been unhappy with the speed of windows built in defragger.. I have downloaded the trial version of Diskeeper 10 pro..
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10/15/2006 11:38:32 PM · #2 |
Originally posted by buzzrock:
Anyone use Diskeeper to defrag your hardrive?
I havent defragged in over a year, and I have always been unhappy with the speed of windows built in defragger.. I have downloaded the trial version of Diskeeper 10 pro.. |
Yeah, I ordered the pro version a couple of weeks ago. It keeps telling me how many thousands of fragments it has cleaned up. I wouldn't think I could generate so many fragments in only two weeks. (the first defrag was something like 38,000 fragments - on a very active, but very full disk, so I kinda believe it - but have to wonder about the rest)
It also tells me how much it has sped up my hard drive. But... to be honest, I can't tell you whether it's really any faster or not. I didn't benchmark it before starting, and I really don't see much difference now.
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10/16/2006 12:24:55 AM · #3 |
Originally posted by buzzrock:
Anyone use Diskeeper to defrag your hardrive?
I havent defragged in over a year, and I have always been unhappy with the speed of windows built in defragger.. I have downloaded the trial version of Diskeeper 10 pro.. |
I use it and I love it. It works so much better than the Windows built in one. The best part is that you can schedule it to defrag while you sleep or do something else. It can also defrag multiple drives at once unlike the Windows one. Like dwterry said, it also tells you how much it can and has sped up your hard drive and how many fragments you have. It will also report on the current health and performance of each drive that you have. Overall, it's much much better than the Windows one. I've been using diskkeeper for more than 2 years now and am very satisfied with it.
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10/16/2006 12:44:43 AM · #4 |
It's installed on my work machine and I use it weekly. It's much faster than XP defrag. OTOH, there's no evidence that it actually works any better, or even works at all. Maybe it just re-writes the file allocation table. I dunno. My home machine seems faster after defrag (with XP), but I probably move/add/write/delete a lot more files on that one.
Watching the drive maps on both, it appears that XP wants to move as much as it can to the front of the drive. Executive Diskeeper makes no effort to do that, so I suspect that their theory is that it is unnecessary, and therein lies the speed. |
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10/16/2006 12:58:33 AM · #5 |
The latest that I've read from my catalog of computer mags is that defrag is almost not needed anymore. Computers and hard drives have become so fast that there is almost no speed difference in defraged vs undefraged drives...
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10/16/2006 01:00:48 AM · #6 |
I just leave my computer on all the time. I reboot like once every 3 months when the power goes out or windows crashes, so defragging doesn't make any sense for me to do. That is a joke.
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10/16/2006 01:04:20 AM · #7 |
Originally posted by buzzrock:
Anyone use Diskeeper to defrag your hardrive?
I havent defragged in over a year, and I have always been unhappy with the speed of windows built in defragger.. I have downloaded the trial version of Diskeeper 10 pro.. |
Defrag weekly and it doesn't take long at all...
Remember what we do...we take photos...we put them on our pewters...then we delete them...and then we copy more photos to the disk... we fragment our pewters daily...
photog's are probably the worst for fragmenting a pewter... |
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10/16/2006 03:40:57 AM · #8 |
Originally posted by awpollard:
Defrag weekly ... |
... or use a proper operating system. ; ) |
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10/16/2006 07:48:42 AM · #9 |
Originally posted by ddpNikon:
I just leave my computer on all the time. I reboot like once every 3 months when the power goes out or windows crashes, so defragging doesn't make any sense for me to do. That is a joke. |
How often you reboot has nothing to do with whether defragmenting will be beneficial. Only thing that matters is how many times you write, delete, write again...
There's no set schedule that's good for all drives. Some extremenly active drives (think file servers) might benefit from a weekly defragmenting, though that seems excessive. Most home or business computer hard drives don't require it any more often than once every couple months, some as long as six months or more. It's only when fragmentation becomes excessive that the drive slows down perceptibly.
I do agree that the XP defragger is obscenely slow. |
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10/16/2006 11:49:17 AM · #10 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by ddpNikon:
... That is a joke. |
How often you reboot has nothing to do with whether defragmenting will be beneficial. |
:::cough::: :::cough::::
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10/16/2006 12:03:39 PM · #11 |
Do you like filing a stack of papers? I really don't!
to use an analogy to explain...
The computer takes out a file from the filing cabinet and when its done just stuffs it in the nearest empty space. sometimes it gets split up into several smaller pieces. like putting all the papers in one folder into several unrelated folders. Now when you need that file you have to thumb thru all the unrelated folders to find all the fragments of that file you need to use. (sound like fun?) This is what slows down the machine. Defragging sorts out all the fragments and puts them back together in its own spot so when you recall that file, it knows right where to go. It may take a while but I set mine to run when I go to bed and wake up to a defragged machine.
My husband being a field tech defraggs his weekly. I think that is excessive but doesn't hurt. I do mine monthy when I think about it.
I add and delete huge folders of images so I really should do it more often.
Hope this helps.
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10/16/2006 12:39:21 PM · #12 |
Originally posted by Tlemetry:
Do you like filing a stack of papers? I really don't!
to use an analogy to explain...
The computer takes out a file from the filing cabinet and when its done just stuffs it in the nearest empty space. sometimes it gets split up into several smaller pieces. like putting all the papers in one folder into several unrelated folders. Now when you need that file you have to thumb thru all the unrelated folders to find all the fragments of that file you need to use. (sound like fun?) |
Thats a somewhat misleading analogy because the drive doesnt actually have to thumb through anything and "search". It knows where everything is via the file allocation table, the slowdown occures when the data for a give file are not in contiguous space. The drive head simply has to move so it can access the next peice of data. When a given file is in one continuous space on the disk there isnt any head movement and can just read in the whole file.
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10/16/2006 01:22:54 PM · #13 |
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10/16/2006 03:37:49 PM · #14 |
ive always thought that defraging a comp every once in a while was good for it but my husband swears he started having problems with his since i defraged it. Must have been his imagination?
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10/20/2006 08:40:25 PM · #15 |
I defrag every night, mainly because I do occasioanly have a big chunk of file churn. Defrag time as a process scales as the disk becomes more fragmented, so keeping it minimal to begin with as a strategy keeps you from having to do one that takes 8 hours to complete(or think of it as 8 one hour chunks instead of a single 8 hour one).
The built in defragger is based on Diskkeeper, it's sorta Diskkeeper lite. It can be scheduled(the command line version, C:\windows\system32\defrag.exe specifically can be scheduled). if you leave your machine on all the time or only sleep it anyway, just have it run at like 4 AM...
Defragging does increase disk use since it is potentially moving stuff around, which does mean there's a possibility while moving something goes wrong(power failure or whatever) which can lead to data loss(hence the admonoshiment from software to always backup first, a more important thing to do regardlesS).
Diskkeeper, unless they've changed it, doesn't to my knowledge to space consolidation, which is a separate process from defragging. With debatable merits, which of course means it depends on what you do.
O&O defrag has some interesting defrag options which might be of use in some situations(file relocation based on usage patterns). I used to really like speeddisk, not since symantec got ahold of it I don't know if it's any good. These days I think Perfectdisk is my preferred power defrag, but I generally just used the windows one on the scheduler.
kirbic: file servers typically need to get defragged way more then once a week unless they things almost never change on them, same as desktops.
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10/20/2006 09:04:23 PM · #16 |
Haven't defragged in about
a month and got curious:
Looks worse that it seems to be, per windows report:
Volume AUX (C:):
Volume size = 111 GB
Cluster size = 32 KB
Used space = 97,423 MB
Free space = 17,019 MB
Percent free space = 14 %
Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 1 %
File fragmentation = 2 %
Free space fragmentation = 1 %
File fragmentation
Total files = 88,023
Average file size = 1,100 KB
Total fragmented files = 997
Total excess fragments = 3,652
Average fragments per file = 1.04
Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 768 MB
Total fragments = 2
Directory fragmentation
Total directories = 9,944
Fragmented directories = 27
Excess directory fragments = 55
Think I should get some more drives, or at least bigger ones. ;)
(Might explain a few of my Photoshop slowdowns lately) |
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10/20/2006 09:58:51 PM · #17 |
Defrag'ing is a waste of time and has been since the days of FAT file systems and disks with snail speed seek times.
Using the example posted below - You show around 17 gig of free space. Do you really think you'll be dealing with a file any time soon that is so big your computer can't find a spot in those 17 gigs to lay the file down sequentially?
Defrag'ing a disk that is showing 1% fragmentation is going to save you 2, maybe 3, MILLIseconds next time you access some data on that disk. And it's also going to go right back to 1-2% fragmentation with the next half dozen emails you receive and the next few websites you visit that litter your browser temp dir with bits and pieces of www flotsam.
Any harm in defragging your disk all the time? No, though there is a finite amount of time your disk is built to spin for and defrag'ing it chews up some of that time like everything else. |
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10/20/2006 11:57:36 PM · #18 |
Originally posted by routerguy666:
Defrag'ing is a waste of time and has been since the days of FAT file systems and disks with snail speed seek times.
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That's only true if you have no file churn. Depending on your activitie, degfragging can be beneficial or have pretty minimal returns. That's why I mentioned O&O, file re-ordering can be much more visibly beneficial. Say you have file churn in jpegs, you could very easily end up with a grouping of files not sequentially ordered on disk, re-ordering files so they are laid out better could speed up thumbnail previews a lot. It just depends.
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10/21/2006 12:12:47 AM · #19 |
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Make sure you defrag your memory cards too! You don't need a third-party utility to do so.
After moving all your images to your computer (then burning them to DVD or backing them up somewhere else), simply choose the format option on your camera to format the memory card.
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