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How does disk defragging work? "Diskeeper has completed a defragmentation run on this volume and there remain 122 fragmented files and/or directories and 3413 excess fragments. (There were 4863 excess fragments before the defragmentation run, and now there are 29% fewer.)"
Philo
Isn't defragging like playing solitaire? You shuffle the pieces around until all the proper files line up. Think about Freecell... When you only have 1 open slot, it's not exactly easy to move one stack of cards to another stack where they should be. But when you have 4 or 5 open slots, it becomes much easier.
Mark T A W .com
The operating system has locked files. They stay fragmented and force other files from defragmenting. It didn't happen back in the DOS days because no one was locking anything.
Li-fan Chen
Li-fan, which see: "not in use"
Philo
Mark - Solitaire's different; it's got rules to make it hard.
Philo
Not helpful to your problem at hand, maybe, but I use the explicit defrag tool built into the OS, and it always results in a perfectly defragmented drive for drives that are not in use, and gets pretty darn close for the OS drive (which will always have locked files).
Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
>> "Not helpful to your problem at hand, maybe, but I use the explicit defrag tool built into the OS, and it always results in a perfectly defragmented drive for drives that are not in use, and gets pretty darn close for the OS drive (which will always have locked files)."
abcde
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question548.htm
Dave B.
These links may answer your question better than the previous link I posted:
Dave B.
Another one: (Kinda old but still applies I think)
Dave B.
I have to ask "Does it matter?" Its always been my experience that de-fragging made no performance improvement so I never bother anymore. In which case why try to be so thorough? Or is it the case that I've always been using a lame (built-in) one and that's why I see no gain?
sgf
I know that you *can* do it with just one empty slot, so to speak, but at some point you reach a point of diminishing returns where you're fragmenting other files in order to defrag others.
Mark T A W .com
I generally only defrag when my hard drive gets really bad, and then I think about it because I notice the drive thrashing when I do anything. So I defrag the heck out of everything, and definitely notice an increase in responsiveness.
Philo
I've used a number of different programs over the years but have generally preferred Norton Speed Disk. With Windows XP I have noticed something similar to what Philo mentions in his original post -- Speed Disk runs for a while and then reports that it's done, but the on-screen display clearly shows that there is still some fragmentation. This is on drives that have lots of free space (for example 120 gig drive with 60-70 gig free).
Maytag Repairman
Thanks to Dve B for this link (
Maytag Repairman
If you haven't already, you may want to try PerfectDisk by Raxco ( http://www.raxco.com/ ). Over the years, I've switched between Diskeeper and PerfectDisk depending on which one worked better on my systems in their current versions. I'm currently using PerfectDisk version 6, which has done a much better job (i.e. few or no remaining fragmented files) on my systems than Diskeeper 7. I haven't tried Diskeeper 8 yet.
Jack Johnson
Diskeeper can be set to run defrag at boot-time, there are also options relating to defragmentation of the paging file, MFT, etc. Maybe some of those would have an effect?
Eponymous Biro
i'm thinking about setting up a schedule for my disk defrag - is there any harm to doing this daily, weekly, etc? can defragging too often hurt my hard drive?
nathan
___"an defragging too often hurt my hard drive? "_---
Stephen Jones
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