Vista Disk Defragmenter has been running for over 24-hrs. - Is this normal?

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Praetorius

Limp Gawd
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Jun 6, 2002
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I've been running Disk Defragmenter on Vista for over 24-hours now. I have a 500GB hard drive. I can't believe it's not finished yet. Is this normal?
 
How often have you run Defrag in the past? If it's been a long time, and you've moved a lot of data around, it could take a very long time. Even more so if the drive is close to being full.
 
This is my first time running it ever. I noticed it's more simplified than the XP version. The problem is there's no indication of progress. I don't know where it's at in the defrag process.
 
Wasn't that supposed to be a feature of Vista? Automatic weekly background defragging?
 
I've had mine take 24 hours+ for a 320gb drive, annoying as shit. Particularly with no progress/status bar.
 
TheGamerZ said:
Wasn't that supposed to be a feature of Vista? Automatic weekly background defragging?
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Like H-street mentioned, it is something that is scheduled to run, but often people turn it off. Anyway, if you have a 500 GB hard drive that is pretty full, and VERY fragmented, it's going to take a while. Not having the progress bar kind of stinks, though I believe Microsoft said they removed it because it wasn't reliable and gave any good indication of how much time is left (though you could still see how far you've progressed).

Anyway, you can always do what TheGamerZ suggested, and try a free defragger program. There's some good ones out there, that do have a progress bar.
 
Jerome36 said:
Not having the progress bar kind of stinks, though I believe Microsoft said they removed it because it wasn't reliable and gave any good indication of how much time is left (though you could still see how far you've progressed).
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They need to do the same thing with their file copy dialogs.

Calculating...3 minutes remaining...60 seconds...5 minutes...45 seconds...10 seconds...2 hours...30 seconds...5 weeks remaining.
 
I noticed the defragger in Vista always seemed to be running for whatever reason, even on a HDD that wasn't full or had files that were moved around alot. It annoyed the shit out of me too. In fact, just one more reason I love Windows 7, I immediately noticed after installing Windows 7 that it defragged a lot less (on the same machine, with the same usage level).

I don't know what changed in Windows 7, but defragmenting seemed to become a lot better.
 
Why do you care whether it's running or not? You don't want it using noticable iops while you're using the computer and you don't want it preventing the computer from entering low power states when you're not using the computer.
 
Something I've found with the automatic defrag in both Vista and Win7 is that it's extremely sensitive to CPU usage. Since CPUs reduce their clocks when idle, CPU usage at very low percentages can be inaccurate. 10% CPU usage when the CPU has underclocked itself to 800 MHz isn't the same as 10% at 3.6 GHz. So it almost never had a chance to run for more than a minute or two because the CPU would underclock and CPU usage spike. I went into the task scheduler and unchecked the condition that the system must be idle for the task to run and this made the defragger behave properly. It still runs at such a low priority that you can't really tell when it's running because of all the other disk thrashing Vista and Win7 do.
 
JimmiG said:
Something I've found with the automatic defrag in both Vista and Win7 is that it's extremely sensitive to CPU usage. Since CPUs reduce their clocks when idle, CPU usage at very low percentages can be inaccurate. 10% CPU usage when the CPU has underclocked itself to 800 MHz isn't the same as 10% at 3.6 GHz. So it almost never had a chance to run for more than a minute or two because the CPU would underclock and CPU usage spike. I went into the task scheduler and unchecked the condition that the system must be idle for the task to run and this made the defragger behave properly. It still runs at such a low priority that you can't really tell when it's running because of all the other disk thrashing Vista and Win7 do.
Click to expand...

This is why I have a lower multiplier limit set to 6, solves a lot of the issues with machine when the CPU downclocks too much
 
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