Defragging

[mrurmil]

I have a total of 5 partitions on my computer on a physical 160GB Hard drive.

Anyways, the C: drive (which is the main system drive) and the E: drive which i store all my media files on (the largest drive) keep saying they should be defragmented in the disk defragmenter utility. I defrag them, and analyze again, and they say it should be defragmented again. This happens over and over.

Does anyone have any idea? Should I keep defragging until it goes away or what?

 

[onetrueday]

time to get a new defraggin utility?

 

[spikegifted]

You should check out this thread... Also, I personally don't really like the idea of having more than 2 partitions on a physical drive... If that drive goes, your entire computing life goes with it!

 

[Ice Czar]

Originally posted by spikegifted
Also, I personally don't really like the idea of having more than 2 partitions on a physical drive... If that drive goes, your entire computing life goes with it!

Well if everything is on one drive...
But how is that different from 1 or 2 partitions?
having 4 partitions (or additional logical drives) wont effect the lifespan of the HDD, but in the event of corruption, it could save a considerable amount of data, it can also assist in performance, and keeping the data defragmented

Partitioning Strategies

as to why the defrag is constantly asking to be done over and over
how much freespace is there on the drives?
is the media drive used for downloading P2P?

You might need to examine both your partitioning Strategy as well as your Defrag application

here is a link to complete overkill with several serious data recovery complications, but that was primarily devised to forstall fragmentation (to the exclusion of almost everything else )
not a recommendation in whole, but probably applicable in part.

Super Partitioning @ ZapWizard

applications like O&O defrag, & Diskeeper, can run in the background with whatever resources happen to be available, in addition they can reorginize the data by criteria like name, date or access, into contiguous files, whereas many defrag programs do less than a great job of contiguous defrags, the most likely senerio is that you are creating new data which quickly overwhelms the "trigger" level for the prompt

spikegifted thats quite the render farm youve got there
developing thermonuclear weapons? care to help with my Death Ray development?
I'll let you rule Australia, when my plans for World Domination come to fruition

 

[stevewm]

For defrag to work write there needs to be free space on the drive. There needs to be enough space to at least move the biggest fragmented file.

 

[enyceexdanny]

Defragmenter that comes included with windows isn't all that great. No matter how many times you defragment, it can't seem to get the fragmentation level low.

I've been using O&O defrag for a while now, and it has been great. It actually gets the fragmentation level to 0%.
It even does a boot time defrag for your system files that can't be moved during normal windows operation.

 

[mrurmil]

Drive C is 4.87GB with 2.01GB free.
Drive E is 102GB with 42.8GB free.
And yes, I use drive E for downloading and sharing P2P files.

 

[’m‚³‚ñ]

Originally posted by mrurmil
Drive C is 4.87GB with 2.01GB free.
Drive E is 102GB with 42.8GB free.
And yes, I use drive E for downloading and sharing P2P files.

I have a 60 gig staging area for eMule. As it downloads chunks of files, it pushes up the fragmentation level. I have had fragmentation levels around 90% on this drive, so I defragment very often. P2P is going to do that, especially emule and other edonkey type clients.

Odd, I've used the XP defragmenter pleanty, and unless it's on the windows drive or a drive with locked files, it gets my fragmentation level down to the 0-1% level, usually 0%. Then again, I'm using software RAID on several of my partitions, and I'm using Dynamic Disks. I don't really care about data integrity, and I doubt that a normal RAID card could give me these same partition sizes...

Try O&O defragmenter. It's worth a shot.

 

[Ice Czar]

well there is plenty of space to actually do the defrag
as stevewm pointed out, if a drive gets too full it cant move the files around enough to defragment them, and you have to either delete them or relocate them till there is enough room.

Originally posted by mrurmil
I use drive E for downloading and sharing P2P files.

there is the problem with that drive, by the very nature of how P2P downloads are done (a little bit here, a little bit there, some of something else, ect), It fragment the holy hell out of a partition. The best thing you can do it to copy the files over to a new partition once the download is complete, and to defrag both regularly

as far as the ap included with XP\W2K is a pint sized version of Diskeeper and leave alot to be desired, with an ap like O&O, you can select a different strategy for a given partition, for your OS, you might want Access, For Media, Name, for projects Date, the control and automation is impressive, with automatic defrags that occur in the background with whatever resources are available, and are triggered by a threshold of fragmentation that you set.
You can defrag multiple volumes concurrently, add locked files to defrag at boot (in addition to the Registry & Master File Table)

the answer the the media partition is pretty obvious, but without a usage pattern its hard to detrime why your OS partition is needing to be defragmented so often, there could be indexing, logs, actual work :eeK: ect that is triggering it.

Background information - hard disk fragmentation

 

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by Ice Czar
spikegifted thats quite the render farm youve got there
developing thermonuclear weapons? care to help with my Death Ray development?
I'll let you rule Australia, when my plans for World Domination come to fruition

Well, it's just a little project I've... A rather humble render farm which I spend time and money to upgrade when I was unemployed hoping to develop some alternative income source... Since I'm not really pushing things anymore, it's most crunching S@H these days.