Just learned a valuable lesson

[AluminumHaste]

Never force close the Defrag process no matter how annoyingly unresponsive your computer is. My disk queue was at 10 and computer was almost completely unresponsive so I force closed Perfect Disk while it was defraging the MFT.

After that my SVN copy of darkmod was broken and now chkdsk is repairing my computer for the last 20 minutes. 1.2 million index entries seems a little high. I hope it boots after this.

 

STUPID STUPID STUPID me

[Serpentine]

I'll throw in another free lesson: Use MyDefrag rather

[Bikerdude]

yeah window defrag is utterly pointless and useless, not woth the hdd space it occuppies.

 

Defraggler is also another good one.

[AluminumHaste]

It was Raxco's Perfect Disk

[lost_soul]

Ouchies. I was always under the impression that if your machine shut off during a defrag, it wouldn't be that big of a deal because of both NTFS's journaling and defrag supposedly copying information to a new spot before removing it from the old one.

[Serpentine]

A number of the more commercial defrag tools don't use the Windows defrag API to do the work, MyDefrag and most of the smaller ones do. There's very little gained by rewriting, other than that you can provide a lot more information - tho it's seldom ever used, resulting in them doing pretty much the same job as the free alternatives.

 

PerfectDisk does not use the API, it uses it's own low level driver which ~does things~, and as you know anything that's got logic moving from user to kernel space is likely to do bad things if something goes wrong, at worst you'd also get a nice BSOD, fs leak and perhaps a few misplaced writes.

 

The Win API way is rather safe, however it's still not foolproof, just like a journaled filesystem can still become dirty as a log is only as good as its entries.

[demagogue]

I use smart defrag. I always start it before I go to be and let it go overnight. I don't do it much anyway.

[STiFU]

So what's so problematic about the automatic defrag of windows 7? I never had any problems and my discs never get fragmented...

[OrbWeaver]

I was under the impression that defragging was one of those superstitious things that hasn't actually been necessary since about 1996 due to the advances in filesystem and hard disk technology, but people still do it in the hope that it will make their PC a bit faster even though it probably doesn't.

[Sotha]

...people still do X in the hope that it will make Y even though it probably doesn't.

 

After the X/Y generalization we could safely say that everyone does this occasionally on various topics. I'd say it is an inherent human quality. Why wouldn't people do it on X=defrag, Y=PC speed?

[STiFU]

I can say for sure, that there is a benefit in not having fragmented datastreams on your discs, because repositioning the reading head induces latency. I can't say though how strongly performance is affected.

[OrbWeaver]

After the X/Y generalization we could safely say that everyone does this occasionally on various topics. I'd say it is an inherent human quality. Why wouldn't people do it on X=defrag, Y=PC speed?

 

True, in fact this is the very definition of "superstition".

 

I can say for sure, that there is a benefit in not having fragmented datastreams on your discs, because repositioning the reading head induces latency

 

Right, but as I understand it, (1) modern filesystems are better at avoiding fragmentation in normal use, by allocating blocks more intelligently and using extents or other features, and (2) with the automatic reallocation of modern hard drives there is no guarantee that the ordering of blocks on the logical filesystem will even match the layout on the physical disk, so your carefully "defragmented" filesystem might in fact be jumping around all over the place on the magnetic platters. I have also heard that fragmentation is/was only a problem with disks that become substantially full, which is rarer these days with much larger capacities.

 

Not that I am a disk storage expert by any means, but I suspect that the case for using "special" defragmentation programs on a regular basis is probably rather weak.

[SeriousToni]

Why don't use the Win7 standard defrag?

[Serpentine]

Not that I am a disk storage expert by any means, but I suspect that the case for using "special" defragmentation programs on a regular basis is probably rather weak.

While this is partly true, the thing to remember is that defragmentation is a rather vague term. Would the tool just try and order blocks? what would its back off criteria be? does it understand file types and directory structure? does it make bad assumptions about these structures?

 

The Windows tool is very simple, it just wants to do the least work possible, and as such you'll get files that are infrequently used in the middle of common reads, not a very ideal situation as you want these areas to be in the outside of a disk. Do you really want a pile of movies sitting next to your system bins? Do you let your distro tune your disks and controllers for you? Have you tried doing it by hand? Once you try it yourself you might be surprised, but it's very work-type specific...

 

NTFS is by no means as bad as the good ol days of Win95 and FAT32, but it's also not very good at maintaining itself (which is not always a bad thing). But the API provided is good, and free tools which offer a good set of basic logic or adaptability to your workload are out there.