Has anyone ever heard NTFS doesn't need defrag?

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Syndicated_Death

[H]ard|Gawd
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So today I asked my IT guy to defrag one of the computers here for one of my coworkers. the reply I got back from my IT guy was, "why. it doesn't do anything on a ntfs system."

Personally this is the first I've ever heard of this. I did a google search and there does seem to be a myth about this. Has anyone else ever heard anything about this one way or the other?

Oh and in case anyone is wondering why I didn't just do it myself? ... no admin privs to do so. well not legitmate admin access. I only try to use my nt psswd disk for good. :cool:
 
I have heard that defragmenting was unnecessary however as a programmer I have seen ntfs filesystems where 80% of the files were fragmented. I have also seen similar claims and similar fragmentation levels in the linux world for xfs.
 
Never heard anyone claim that for NTFS. It is well known it usually is much less fragmented than fat-32 would get but still. The usual myth is that linux file-systems don't get fragmented which is also a huge myth and totally untrue.
 
I've always read that NTFS is "fragmentation resistant" because of the way it allocates blocks for new files. It will still get fragmented over time though. Whether the fragmentation is enough to cause noticeable performance degradation is probably application dependent.
 
Windows even puts defrag for NTFS volumes on a schedule by default, unless they are on SSD's. It's sad that there are so many dumb sysadmins out there :/
 
please report back how your "IT" guy responds to those links
 
Syndicated_Death said:
Awesome CrimsonKnight13! Thank you very much for the linkage.
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Glad I could help. I agree with those that said it, too many idiotic "IT" people. Those of us that are enthusiasts in the IT career fields have to clean up the messes of such people. I've done it quite a lot in the last few years. I've become a lot more skilled in knowing how to correct a "fix" that didn't work but it sometimes makes a bad name for the real IT people that want to make the world better with technology. :mad:

CzarKasm said:
Make an Ultimate Boot CD and do it without needing to crack/reset passwords.

UBCD4WIN
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Any WinPE disc is a good way to go.
 
jojo69 said:
please report back how your "IT" guy responds to those links
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Knowing these guys I expect to get no response at all.... I spoke to soon. He just emailed me back. asking which machine needs to have it scheduled.

What really irritates me is why should I have to go through all this just to get them to do their job? There are a number of things I would just do myself since I'm everyone's goto guy for this crap anyways. I'm out here in California and they are back in New Jersey so if they can't remote in like they couldn't yesterday... They have these things locked down pretty tight. To me that wouldn't be such an issue if their implementation didn't cause issues for us on a monthly if not weakly basis.

This is just an example of many that I have to deal with all to often
 
Well, not knowing much about Linux, taking a Intro course and learning about the OS and file systems a wee-bit, it would seem defragging does next to nothing for it. But when it comes to Windows and FAT16/FAT32 I would definitely say it helps and from my experiences it also benefits NTFS. I've never heard NTFS proving defragging useless. Then again it strikes up the decades old argument about the people that swear by it (like me) and the others who say it's just a false sense of added benefit.


Going from a RAID0, I've never seen the system higher than 2% fragmentation prior to a defrag and really saw little improvement, mostly I'd say due to the RAID0 array. Going back to a single drive I'm constantly in the 4-6% fragmentation each day and I tend to defrag even more because everything feels sluggish. I see noticeable improvement, at least for the day.

I will always use a defrag program on my hard drives, probably until I die or get an SSD because for me I've never once not felt the benefits when the drive gets at least 4% fragmented. It really is up to you though. I would call bullshit on your IT guy as I've been using NTFS since Windows 2000 and can say defragging has boosted my performance in my work environment ever since.
 
I think it depends on the version of NTFS you're talking about. If this is Win2k or XP, then yeah, it should probably be done on occasion.

But if you're talking Windows 7, I'd be terrified to hear that defragmentation is required. And by "terrified" I mean "in tears". Our filesystem tech knowledge is beyond this by now.

Fragmentation of some files -- e.g., large media files -- isn't even necessarily a problem, especially if they're split across multiple platters but at the same location.
 
jwcalla said:
I think it depends on the version of NTFS you're talking about. If this is Win2k or XP, then yeah, it should probably be done on occasion.

But if you're talking Windows 7, I'd be terrified to hear that defragmentation is required. And by "terrified" I mean "in tears". Our filesystem tech knowledge is beyond this by now.

Fragmentation of some files -- e.g., large media files -- isn't even necessarily a problem, especially if they're split across multiple platters but at the same location.
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I could be wrong about this, but I thought vista and 7 defragged as a background operation when deemed necessary. or is that the indexer that is thrashing my drives while my computer is idle?
 
that is thrashing my drives while my computer is idle?
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Could be defrag, indexer, antivirus ...

Also some of these like antivirus do not care if your PC is idle.
 
I manually defrag all the time. I tend to have full disks and when I will unrar a video file to a drive it will end up in thousands of chunks. If I need to watch that file I defrag it first (just the one file), or it will be an horrible experience.

On another computer I have a 2TB bittorrent drive. It's full, and man, the fragmentation is incredible, two millions fragments ! Have moved 10% of its contents elsewhere and no free block in sight. It has been defragging for more than a week now, still 500000 fragments left.

As for the "same place on different platters", well, that's just the same place, an HDD works cylindrically. The OS doesn't know that there are (or aren't, in case of an SSD) several platters.
 
houkouonchi said:
Never heard anyone claim that for NTFS. It is well known it usually is much less fragmented than fat-32 would get but still. The usual myth is that linux file-systems don't get fragmented which is also a huge myth and totally untrue.
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While NTFS *does* fragment less than even FAT32 (that has been thoroughly documented), it still fragments - since Diskeeper gained support for FAT32 a decade back, it has been my defragmentation utility of choice for Windows - until now. Ironically, what killed off Diskeeper was, of all things, an improved included disk-defragmentation utility included with Windows 8, and it has a new name that it actually deserves - Disk Optimizer.

Why Disk Optimizer?

First off, it supports multi-pass defragmentation, which no included version of Disk Defragmenter had done previously (and something that WAS included in big-brother Diskeeper).

Second, it is entirely graphical - no text mode needed at all.

Thirdly, it no longer requires a restart for any mode (the text-mode was for going back and defragmenting files the GUI mode couldn't/didn't get - that is now moot).

I still recommend Diskeeper for versions of Windows prior to 8.
 
extide said:
Windows even puts defrag for NTFS volumes on a schedule by default, unless they are on SSD's. It's sad that there are so many dumb sysadmins out there :/
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The hilarious part is that scheduled "defragmentor" will actually deliberately fragement files.

The defragmentor or optimizer as it gets called in later versions cooperates with superfetch which monitors application startup process to re-order file fragements so it can transform random reads into sequential reads.

This obviously isn't needed for SSDs, but is great for spinning disks
 
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Your IT guy is correct in a way. As Syndicated_Death said, manual defragmentation hasn't been necessary anymore for the past 3 versions of Windows.
These 2 articles on Windows NT and 2000 were valid last millennium though.
 
NTFS does need defrag on a mechanical drive. I would say NTFS doesn't need to be defraged as often as FAT32, but it does get fragmented.
 
qbanb8582 said:
NTFS does need defrag on a mechanical drive. I would say NTFS doesn't need to be defraged as often as FAT32, but it does get fragmented.
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It's been thoroughly documented that NTFS fragments more slowly than fat32.
 
I'm down to 300 000 fragments. I found some more GB of files that could be erased, that greatly helped. Still a few days to go.
 
I'm convinced that in the Windows NT 3.5.1 / 4.0 days there was a claim that NTFS did not need defragging. Maybe because there was no defrag util supplied within the OS. There is quite a few statements around this in google/bing but nothing concrete from MS that I can find. Anyway, third parties (Diskeeper?) probably made some nice money out of this state of events at the time. :)
 
I think "need" is relative. Without looking at the fragmentation level of any particular file system, the need to defrag can be questionable.

Without understanding how a working dataset is used, even fragmented, you can't really say what is "needed". What if we're talking about a 4GB dataset that is hardly modified and on NT6.x is wholly cached? Is there a need?

What I will say is what every X vendor who sells defragmentation software, and defrag advocates, their claims on how much defragmenting their file system will affect performance is... exaggerated.

PS For any Windows 8 users, don't turn off the scheduled "defrag" (Storage Optimizer!) job just because you have an SSD. It doesn't defrag the drive (its smarter), just "trim"s that baby up.
 
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