A while back I read a thread on defrag'ging your hard drives. I installed the software and used it, it was quite a good bit of kit. However I had to wipe my computer months back and forgot what it was called. Can anyone tell me what software they use OTHER than the Windows default version. TY!
You can use CCleaner can wipe a hard drive or you can use defraggler made by the same company both work well.
Not sure specifically which one you are talking about but I adopted Auslogics defrag program a few years ago and haven't switched yet. Not sure if it still is any good or not but at the time it was getting rave reviews.
do people still defrag, didn't bit-tech/custom pc do a write up on why its not worth doing now? time/benefit
Perfectdisk is a good one, but it's not free. I think it is worthwhile to defragment your disks every now and then, just so long as you're not sitting staring at it whilst it's doing so.
I'd be interested in seeing that too. Just to see the logic in such a stupid argument. You sure it wasn't SSD specific? Allowing a regular HDD to become heavily fragmented has a huge hit on performance.
As has already been mentioned, make sure you run CCleaner before running any defrag. You want to clear out temporary internet files, empty recycle bin etc before defragging, to save time.
i remember reading it somewhere, but cant remember if it was bit-tech/custompc, or wether it was a sister magazine. to be honest defragging doesn't make that much difference to modern harddrives, the time it takes to defrag the harddrive, for a few milliseconds of faster loading that the average person wouldn't even notice a difference. add to that that win7 defrags anyway when the computer is on but not being used.
When i install Windows, Cleaner and Defraggler are the first 2 apps that go on. I find Defraggler a lot faster than the built in defrag tool.. Anybody else notice that?
Defragging a normal hard drive makes a lot of sense. File access is just that bit more snappy. Although of course it depends on the program used. Just never try to defrag an SSD! By the way, I use Diskeeper, which runs in the background in Set & Forget mode. I usually never have to perform an on-demand defragging.
In theory deragmenting makes a lot of sense. Lets say you are reading a 100MB file, if its entirely sequential on the hard drive you'll see it load in a little under a second (120MB/s on a modern drive). However if every 4KB was in a different place on the drive it might only read at 1.5MB/s, taking over a minute to load. That however is a pretty pathological case and in practical terms you only really see a few fragments per file. Each fragment could cost you about 5-10ms, so you really need a lot of them to have a problem. At 100% fragmentation performance is going to be 1/80th of original, so its a good rule of thumb that every 1% point of fragmentation costs you that much performance. At 10% is it worth defragmenting like Windows does by default? Well that really depends. If its all in one file you use all the time then it may well be worth it, if however its spread evenly on the files on the disk then probably not. Of course if you were on Linux you wouldn't need to do it at all, its a flaw in the Windows file system design that creates the need for such a tool to begin with.
does anyone know of a defragmenter that not only does 100% of the files but also allows you to specify which files you want at the front or end of your disk, Like Norton's speedisk used to?
http://www.mydefrag.com/ the monthly script does a really good job as you run it once then uninstall the defragger after the backup.. I remember norton used to let you put the swap in front (fast) part of the disk- but I haven't seen that since set a custom size for the swap right after you install windows fresh, that should do the trick for the most part- make sure to set it to a static size.. what I do personally is put on windows, setup a static size swap file/update/all software, tweaks (set gpu speeds, gadgets, ect..) setup windows the way I like then defrag it with the monthly first time script.. uninstall mydefrag and clean the registry/compact it with yamicsofts win 7 manager- back it up.. anything you put on after can be undone with a restore from the backup.. and it will restore defragged- no need to run defrag again.. windows vista/7 does defrag itself when idle and takes care of anything you add on if you have a vm, that will let you play around even more recklessly
I use CCleaner + Defragger and that's everythjing you need to keep your computer helthy. Also, these two are free. I also like this software becouse it has only important features, not tons of useless features like commercial software have.
Setting a static size is one of the first things I do but I dual boot and each OS has it's own seperate Program files partition on seperate disks. I tend to put each OS's swap file in the others' Program files partition, which means that when I defragment my current program files partition it also moves the other OS's swap file. I'd rather keep it near the beginning if poss but It's not too important as both disks are pretty fast and the swap file barely gets used for much.
