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How often do I need to defrag my drive?

Discussion in 'DVDR' started by snorkel, Mar 18, 2005.

  1. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    i'd only do it say once a month or so. no need in unnecessarily wearing out ya poor old hard drive. i rarely bother myself as pc only gets used for dialling up work and dvd copying. the dvds only get ripped to the same area of disk anyway. I support Solaris stuff all day at work where defragging is just not necessary HOWEVER have been known to defrag Veritas-controlled discs. Not because they needed defragging, just because we could!.

    I can't schedule my pc to defrag when im not at home as i live on a boat and don't trust leaving pc unattended. have watched one catched fire once (i use AMD cpu now and wouldn't like to thing what would happen if fan/heatsink failed thanks)

    as for raid 0 setup thats nice that you can do that stuff on pc's these days. Not something i can use at work tho!- i use mostly RAID10 on JBOD disk arrays, or RAID5 on our SAN. Even have some old RAID5 standalone disk arrays which are pretty clever

    :)
     
    Last edited: Mar 19, 2005
  2. ScubaBud

    ScubaBud Regular member

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    Just a Heads Up or FYI about Nero and Defrag.

    Thought I'd mention what happened to me after I decided to do a little overdue house cleaning myself and defrag my HDD's. Everything went well and I did see a good improvement in my PC after the defrag and resetting of the Virtual Memory onto a “clean” drive. Today, I decided to watch a DVD I burned a while back on my PC but couldn’t get it to play in my DVD-ROM or Burner. Nero's Showtime would fire up but when I clicked on play, after a few seconds I would get an error message. I decided to reload Nero package one and package two, (package with Showtime,) just for kicks and it did corrected the problem.

    Not saying it will happen with anyone else’s, but just incase I figured it wouldn't hurt to post this here in a defrag thread. <G>
     
  3. brobear

    brobear Guest

    Good point to emphasize ScubaBud. They do say to have things backed up when one goes to defrag. If data can be lost, it is only reasonable to assume programs can be affected as well.
     
  4. fishbulb

    fishbulb Regular member

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    could someone explain how to schedule my comp to defrag at a certain time? i know how to defrag manually from the start menu, accessories, etc. but when i look in my schedule tasks under control panel, i can't figure out how to set it.
    thanx.
    btw, i have two 160 gig hd's. i'll need to schedule both.
     
  5. brobear

    brobear Guest

    Utilities like Norton's Speed Disk have a schedule feature in the program. You can set a time or let it defrag at a set fragmentation threshhold. The schedule wizard in Windows is accessed by opening "Add Scheduled Tasks" in the Scheduled Tasks folder in Control Panel. However, I couldn't find a single command that would start Disk Defragmenter. Possibly someone can help there. I don't see a function in the utility itself to set a scheduled defrag.
     
  6. brobear

    brobear Guest

    Here's some things one should know about defragging.

    [bold]Best practices[/bold]

    [bold]Analyzing before defragmenting[/bold]
    Analyze volumes before defragmenting them. After analyzing a volume, a dialog box tells you the percentage of fragmented files and folders on the volume and recommends whether to defragment the volume. Analyze volumes regularly and defragment them only when Disk Defragmenter recommends it. A good guideline is to analyze volumes at least once a week. If you seldom need to defragment volumes, analyze volumes monthly instead of weekly.

    [bold]Analyzing after large numbers of files are added[/bold]
    Volumes might become excessively fragmented when users add a large number of files or folders, so be sure to analyze volumes after this happens. Generally, volumes on busy file servers should be defragmented more often than those on single-user workstations.

    [bold]Ensure that your disk has at least 15% free space[/bold]
    A volume must have at least 15% free space for Disk Defragmenter to completely and adequately defragment it. Disk Defragmenter uses this space as a sorting area for file fragments. If a volume has less than 15% free space, Disk Defragmenter will only partially defragment it. To increase the free space on a volume, delete unneeded files or move them to another disk.


    [bold]Defragmenting during low-usage periods[/bold]
    Defragment file server volumes during low-volume usage periods to minimize the effect that the defragmentation process has on file server performance. The time that Disk Defragmenter takes to defragment a volume depends on several factors, including the size of the volume, the number of files on the volume, the number of fragmented files, and available system resources.

    [bold]Defragmenting after installing software or installing Windows[/bold]
    Defragment volumes after installing software or after performing an upgrade or clean install of Windows. Volumes often become fragmented after installing software, so running Disk Defragmenter helps to ensure the best file system performance.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 21, 2005

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