Windows 7 forum: Poll: How often do you defrag your hard drive?

If Windows is set to defrag in the background once a week, then you are indeed defragmenting once a week. And yes, defraging is necessary.

and my system does work better after the scan.

To msgale: Win7 does NOT defrag automatically unless you set it to do so. Never set Windows to defrag on a schedule. For that matter, completely disable and delete Windows defrag, it don't work.
To ESUNintel: Why did you bother to post if you have SSDs.
To Leo Koo: What's the difference between "once a week" and "a few times a month" and why is "once a week" suspect?
Here's how to do it. Get a good defragger (Defraggler, Auslogics-bad mapper, ...) and start with once a week. Check % fragmented. If it is above 5-6% do the defrag. Do a feedback loop until you determine how fast your C: drive gets fragmented. If it takes two weeks to get up to 6% then defrag every two weeks.
People who say defragging is unnecessary (on a real HD, not SSD) are relying on the speed of today's modern systems with tiny seek times. Point granted but why have a 50% fragmented drive? There is an aesthetics about computing that says get your s*** together. Concatenate your files. Have a beautiful hard drive with ALL the files neatly situated on its inside cylinders.

Windows defragger doesn't work because it can't defrag itself. It skips its own processes then asks if you want to defrag them at next startup. What a pain in the arse.

How is it overrated?

You left out a category!

I use Diskeeper and it does it in the background, automatically.

Dave

I also use Diskeeper to defrag my disks so my category would be continuously as well.

Why so often?

I have seen some files fragmented into over 14,000 pieces on other user's systems. When you consider that each of those pieces has to be located and "assembled" every time that file is accessed, you are looking at A LOT of disk activity.

This is not just a performance issue (obviously it would be much faster to access a contiguous file with one I/O rather than 14,000 I/Os to access the above file); Disks are mechanical and the more they are used, the faster they wear out. It's as simple as that.

I know many users who gripe about how modern disks "wear out much faster than they used to", etc.

But in IMO disks are just used a lot more than they used to be, not just because files are larger than they used to be and so are disks, but because the disks are faster and larger many users don't feel the need to defrag so the disks wear out prematurely.

Every time a user downloads a file, saves it, plays it, edits it, adds to it, deletes from it, saves it again and then deletes it all together, either fragmented files or fragmented free space are left behind (and fragmented free space further causes new files to fragment so they can occupy the fragmented free space).

So keeping disks defragmented makes them last longer as they are simply used a lot less if the files are not broken into thousands of pieces and scattered all over the disk (my disks "somehow" last much longer than most people I know...)

And as a bonus, the PC performs much better as well.

It's really a no-brainer in my book.....

Even if you have tons of free disk space, you can still get fragmented. My suggestion is to at least run an analyze function with a defragging tool. If it says you should defrag, try it and see if it helps. It is caused by deleting a lot of files and Windows tries to re-use the space. Also by files expanding. Say you have just put a database or some other file out there. Now, other files are "in front" of your file and others move in "behind" your file. Now, you try to add more information to the file but the file is pretty much locked-in by other files. So, to find more room, it just locates another block of space and extends the file there. So now, regardless of the size of the file, you will need to do separate I/Os for each piece. Picture having a 10 MB file that is split up with the average piece only about 15K. How many I/Os would you need? I/O is the thing that slows your computer up the most. Also, compressing and decompressing files can cause fragmentation. Frequently used or recently used files should not be compressed.

For some people drives get fragmented easily while others don't need it very often. Usually, large hard drives with plenty of free space eliminates the need for a lot of this.

Many third party (even FREE ones) will defragment in the background so you left off the choice of "continuously". I have a free one that will even defrag system files for you if you want. I don't check fragmentation that often.

My earlier reply left out one very vital thing, partitions. It is utter folly to use a 2TB or even a 500MB drive as one big C: partition. If you calculate percent fragmented on a 2TB partition you will never see even 1% fragmentation.
One should always partition their hard drive with the C: partition about twice the size required to hold the Windows OS (about 60mb for Win7, 40mb for WinVista). That's the partition you need to defragment. Windows and other programs are very busy creating and deleting log files and the C: partition gets very messy in a short time.
You then create other partitions for your own files. For example I have an E: partition of 120mb for data files, an F: partition of 120mb for "multimedia", an H: partition for music of 60mb, and so on. These data partitions rarely need defragmenting. I check them once in awhile especially E: if I'm creating and deleting Office files, etc. BTW you need to change all your default data file location from C: to your data partition e.g. Office, browsers, mail programs.
To sum up, you need to defragment only your OS partition regularly

Defragmentation was originally created because Microsoft couldn't be bothered, or wasn't cabable, of creating
an OS that used disk space in a sensible manner! So disks became fragmented. This scenario has not been
corrected to this day. Windows 7 still doesn't use disk space in an ordered manner.
However defragging modern drives is a waste of CPU resources!
Consider: The OS doesn't see the true geometry of the drive anymore! Disks are intelligent, and what the OS sees
CCHHSS, is not the true geometry of the disk, generally the disk has less heads and more cylinders than the OS sees.
So if you defrag from the OS, the disk may not be actually defragged at all!!
Secondly, Systems are in general much speedier than in days of yore, as are disk drives.
So defragmentation doesn't affect the speed of operation of the computer anything like it did years ago.
So IMHO, defragging is more or less redundant.

This whole discussion is becoming a moot point!
As solid state drives become cheaper and higher capacity, there will be no need for defragging, since there will be no such thing as fragmentation!
Each location on a SSD is reached as quickly as any other. Any scheme that now places most recently used files where they will be more quickly accessed, will no longer be needed.
Of course, SSDs will bring with them, there own set of problems!

Dave

SSD drive for almost 1.00 per gig. I paid 139 for a 128 gb SSD with a Cloning kit. It came with an external case with USB and Acronis cloning software. It takes 20-25 seconds to boot on my machine and my windows perfomance went from 5.9 to 6.9 with the HD bringing the score down. Because SSD read times are considerably faster then writes when I deleted my page file the windows score wnet form 6.7 to 6.9. Now if i would have went with one of the faster SSD the score would have been closer to 7.5.

IBM DOS had absolutely nothing to do with DOS of the PC. It, IBM DOS, was originally design for the smaller 360 line of computers. One important difference was that the 360 architecture has a user/executive state, whereas the 8088 processor did not. It could also multi-task. As far as I have been able to discern DEC never had an OS called DOS. MS DOS was derived from 86-DOS marketed by Seattle Computer Products. DR DOS was developed by Digital Research and was derived from CP/M.

Almost every system requires defragmentation. Diskeeper developed by Diskeeper Corporation (formerly Executive Software) was originally targeted to DEC's VAX system. On IBM mainframes partitioned data sets have to be reorganized periodically, and on CDC systems indirect files had to be reloaded to recover un-addressable space. Microsoft's goal was to build a file system that would minimize wasted space, what exactly what the FAT file system did on smaller disks. Now with massive disks we should be using NTFS not FAT32.