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45% fragmentation (HD)

T

topslop1

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 15, 2002
Messages
3,185
I've been at the computer gig for a while now but I don't really know too much about hard drives. My current HD is at 45% fragmentation (says O&O defrag) . What's a generally acceptable range for fragmentation and how often should I go about doing it? I'm running Windows 7 and I'm running a 500 gig Samsung 7200rpm.
 
Wow.. I do mine every week, I know lower the % the better. I use Auslogics Disk Defrag.
1.5TB BARRACUDA LP [] WIN 7 64
 
^Huh? win7 defrags on its own.

OP - If you are running XP still then yes you should defrag your drive every so often.
 
Unless of course someone decided to disable the default defragger. I've never ever seen that level of fragmentation on a Windows 7 box (of thousands that I've had hands on experience with) and the worse I get on my own machine (which I am very [H]ard on in terms of daily use and file operations) is like 7-10% at most. I started using Puran Defrag recently - it's free, it's fairly fast (faster than most, especially Defraggler which is molasses-in-winter-slow for some reason), and it gets the job done just fine.

45%... geezus, that's insane. :)
 
Win Vista/7 defragger will not defrag files above 64MB by default and will thus not read the files. As the OP is doing, using a 3rd party defragger is very recommended for a complete defrag.

You can do a complete defrag in Vista/7, but it requires some CLI.
 
There's a nice article from a few years back (2009) about why those changes were made to Vista and Windows 7 with respect to the 64MB chunks, located at the Engineering Windows 7 blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/20...d-engineering-the-windows-7-improvements.aspx

Very interesting info, and definitely nice to know those developers were quite serious about the changes with a lot of research into making them. I know the old rule of thumb is "NTFS sucks" for many non-Windows folk but, all modern file systems fragment to some degree - every single one of them - it's absolutely impossible to prevent it from happening, especially on drives/partitions where the amount of free space becomes a premium because people put way too much on their storage, but that's another thing altogether.

Great article, however, and definitely something to look over if you have a chance. My favorite part of the article was just one single line:

"Best practices for using defragmentation in Windows 7 are simple – you do not need to do anything!"
Click to expand...

which to me falls perfectly in line with the concept I've been preaching for years now of leave it alone. Yes, there are situations where a hard drive can get into some areas of serious loss of performance, but I still can't imagine what the OP is doing or might have done to push it to 45% in that respect unless something is not working as it should be - perhaps the scheduler isn't active or whatever, but my typical fragmentation rarely exceeds 2% when I check it maybe 3 times a month just for kicks. 45% is extraordinary and leads me to believe that something is just not right there...

And like I said earlier, I'm pretty tough on my machine with respect to file operations. I do a lot of audio/sound editing for podcasts of various kinds and I have thousands of small clips all over the place (and a great many of them are actually over 64MB in size too), constantly being created/deleted/moved/repeat and I still barely crack 5% fragmentation at the worst of times.
 
I wonder what some ssd's would like since you never defrag them. I recommend defraging at least once a month, once a week if you can. I can notice the difference between a defragged hard drive and one that isn't.
 
"Best practices for using defragmentation in Windows 7 are simple – you do not need to do anything!"
Click to expand...

Sounds a lot like Apple, aka mindless computing.

That article states 64MB files are left untouched to basically increase performance of the defrag and supposedly have a negative impact on the HDD. Oh, you mean the impact of customers not wanting to wait for the defrag to finish. They don't want to see it or think about it and want it to finish ASAP.

It makes sense that Microsoft would do such a thing from a marketing standpoint.
From a technology standpoint, it's idiotic at best.

That article is just PR bullshit that is very biased towards the lame ass defrag utility in Vista/7.

And like I said earlier, I'm pretty tough on my machine with respect to file operations. I do a lot of audio/sound editing for podcasts of various kinds and I have thousands of small clips all over the place (and a great many of them are actually over 64MB in size too), constantly being created/deleted/moved/repeat and I still barely crack 5% fragmentation at the worst of times.
Click to expand...

Maybe for you, but I do a LOT of video editing. Letting the system build up files with 2GB+ sizes that are fragmented is not intelligent.

Yeah, 64MB music files out of a modern 1-3TB drive isn't much. But when your files are 14GB in size, those fragmented files add up quickly.

For the average user, the built-in Vista/7 defrag utility is fine on the surface. For anyone who actually cares about their NTFS partitions, a 3rd party utility is very necessary.

I'm sorry but that article was nothing but Microsoft PR.


I remember back in 2007, right after Vista was released. Microsoft had removed the contract with the previous defrag utility used from Win NT to XP. The article stated that it was much simpler, and was sooo much better because it only had one button and no one needed to look at "those useless colored graphs."

Like I said, mindless computing.
 
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munkle said:
I wonder what some ssd's would like since you never defrag them. I recommend defraging at least once a month, once a week if you can. I can notice the difference between a defragged hard drive and one that isn't.
Click to expand...

SSDs don't need to be defragged since they operate entirely different from a HDD, so it really wouldn't matter. The data displayed by defraggers would be incorrect since they were not designed for that specific hardware.

+1 to your last sentence.
 
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Red Falcon said:
SSDs don't need to be defragged since they operate entirely different from a HDD.
Click to expand...

I know, I just wonder how fragmented the files actually are on the ssd. Since the ssd tries to level the wear evenly it is going to break stuff as it gets written to the drive so I would imagine they are pretty fragmented. Not that it matters with pretty much instant access time.
 
munkle said:
I know, I just wonder how fragmented the files actually are on the ssd. Since the ssd tries to level the wear evenly it is going to break stuff as it gets written to the drive so I would imagine they are pretty fragmented. Not that it matters with pretty much instant access time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I figured that you knew that, I edited my post to make more sense.

Also from the article:
In Windows Vista, we had removed all of the UI that would provide detailed defragmentation status. We received feedback that you didn’t like this decision, so we listened, evaluated the various tradeoffs, and have built a new GUI for defrag!
Click to expand...

What new GUI? It looks and operates almost exactly the same as the Vista defrag utility, except with a few, very few, more options.
What detailed defragmentation status? Oh, you mean you changed the spinning green circle that doesn't tell us shit to the percentage bar that doesn't tell us shit.

vista_defrag.png

vs
defrag-in-7.jpg


Oh yeah, sooo much better.:rolleyes:
 
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Oh something is spinning alright. ;)

@ Joe Average: Linux, Solaris, OS X, and many other Unix and Unix-like OSes already use files systems which do not need to be defragmented.

JFS+, EXT2/3/4, XFS, and many other file systems rarely, if ever fragment.
NTFS may be high in performance, but in some ways it is very flawed in stability.
 
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As a programmer (who has millions of small files that change often) I have seen > 80% fragmented drives on windows.
 
topslop1 said:
My current HD is at 45% fragmentation (says O&O defrag) . .
Click to expand...
Sorry OP.

Looks like we got a little off-track. :)

45% sounds way out-of-pocket to me.

You need to be under 10% but it's been @ 3 yrs since I've had a mechanical OS drive and I don't remember what was normal for fragmentation.
 
I do not remember the details that much it was around 7 years back on either windows 2000 or XP. Back then I believe I was using OO defrag.
 
Old Hippie said:
LOL!!!

That's an OS drive and it still worked?

I really didn't know it could get that bad! :D :D

Incredible, just freaking incrediblle. :D
Click to expand...

Server 2003 Standard, Terminal Server that was in operation since mid 2006 (EDIT: mid-2004). However the built in defrag that ran every weekend did not do much, even though it was scheduled to run every Sunday. :(

Still worked up until a couple months ago when we virtualized it to Hyper-V, now it just handles scanned documents and printers for our iSeries box at that branch; everybody is on a virtual desktop now.
 
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Even though some bitch extensively about computer hardware I feel this is a testimony to it's resilience against abuse. :)
 
Old Hippie said:
Even though some bitch extensively about computer hardware I feel this is a testimony to it's resilience against abuse. :)
Click to expand...

What hardware? We were talking about the NTFS file system.

The only reason it has withstood the test of time is Microsoft's large corporate backing.

Otherwise EXT4 and JFS+ would easily take the file system crown.
 
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