Quote:
Originally Posted by CandyVanMan
Defrag is a maintenance tool, not a performance booster. In a car, you won't gain 50 horsepower by changing the oil, but if you don't you'll lose more than horsepower with the damage done.
Also, consider a Bittorent file fragmented by default. It's best to consider moving the file to another drive or defragging on a weekly basis if you're constantly downloading torrents.
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I agree with almost everything except the fragmentation issue of torrent files. This depends on whether you use preallocation or not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vexx
aye, I'll frequently dump an entire folder of torrents to another drive as a "cheap defrag" before burning them to disk.
It probably does more good to defrag the system drive (C  periodically. If you have one drive that has both the OS and a mess of data files - it won't hurt to do it more often (once a week or so). |
Once a week sounds like out of proportion imo. At least with NTFS. I have not defragmented my system drive for years and currently it has a fragmentation of overall 25% with filefragmentation of 50%. Well thats 2x70ms or so more access time for every 4th file and 70ms more access time for every 2nd file -statistically (I think I can live with that
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WanderingKnight
Go ext3 (and UNIX filesystems in general) and its almost nonexistent fragmentation |
Works only then well, if you have lots of free space available.
Quote:
Originally Posted by grey_moon
NTFS was billed as a FS that did not require defragging, hence NT not coming with a defragging tool. Unfortunately in practice fragmentation is really bad on it and has some bad performance overheads*. It's been a while since I've read up on it so numbers and references escapes me. But the main evidence is the defrag tool makes a return in later versions of the OS.
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Strange can't one access the defragmenter by default with the drive properties?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tiberium Wolf
You should see how windows xp with ntfs can fragment a file that you have copied to HDD that had 90% of free space. All that free space and he still had to break up the file.
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Which is due to NTFS file systems write from the partition borders to the partition center. Especially large files will likely get splitted in such an write event.
What is most important to have defragmented is the MFT (Master File Table) because each file access will also trigger at least one access to the MFT.