Sunday, January 23, 2011

Wondering, do you defrag?

I believe in defragmentation of computer drives but in this day and age when computer chips and drives are so fast, it doesn’t seem quite as important. Back in the old days, defragmentation could noticeably slow down your computer or, if bad enough, cause it to crash. Also back then, it took all night and the best part of the day to defrag a hard drive, and they were very small capacity drives. Not that the drives were large by any stretch of the imagination, but they were SLOW, SLOW, SLOW.

I defrag my two internal hard drives quite regularly. I have two, the C-drive I use only for programs and the D-drive is for files. Therefore, the C-drive can be defragmented very fast because there is hardly anything on that drive that gets fragmented. That also allows the programs to run at their maximum speed.

The D-drive is another story. Since files are being written to it, read, changed, re-written, moved, copied, deleted, etc. all the time, it gets fragmented for sure. When I run the defragmenter program, it doesn’t take all that long to complete, usually a lot less than hour.

OK, yesterday I decided to defrag my external hard drive. I use it to back up files from my D-drive. I do not back up my C-drive because it only contains programs that can be reloaded. If it would crash so bad that I couldn’t reload the programs, a new hard drive would then be purchased.

To get back to my story, I implemented my bright idea and started the defragmenter program and had it work on the external drive. That took hours and hours and hours. Now, that drive seems very fast to me, so why would it take so much longer to format than my main computer drives? Could it be the USB connection? Maybe I should do it more often, since that was the first time it was ever defragged. What do you think? Will it go faster the next time if I don’t wait long? I guess I could check that by re-running the defrag program on it now before I back up anything else. Nay, that would probably just tell me that it didn’t need it.

They say we all get wiser with age, but I may be wiser but I sure seem to be dumber. . .

17 comments:

  1. Running my computer on Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. No defragging, virus issues, or alot of other junk. Not for everyone, but works for me.

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  2. This new OS, Windows 7 Home Premium always says I don't need to run em. It appears to do a much better job of keeping the HDD clean an aligned.

    I" think" it may do it in the back ground and just don't notice it.

    AS for my external drive ,never tried it,,Hell it s a terabyte drive on USB 2.. Still more spaae than 'll ever use.

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  3. C on my computer is the one I have to defrag. D is my backup. Is this wrong?

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  4. Sixbears, I can't run my parametric modeling and design engineering drawing programs on anything but the Pro editions of windows.

    Ben, I am out of date, still running XP-Pro on my work computer. Does Widows 7 have a Pro eddition?

    Pidge, I defrag both drives, but I have my computer set up to put most of any files generated by my programs on my D-drive. Do you do a lot of work on the computer to have two hard-drives installed in it?

    And to answer your question, NO. A lot of two hard-drive systems are set up to use the second drive as a mirror (or back-up). That way, if one crashes you have everything on the other.

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  5. Like I said, not for everyone. For what I do, it does the job -with free software too. Mostly wordprocessing, photos, some audio stuff, Internet, and some games. I do have engineer friends who are tied down to Windows based programs. My son-in-law runs both OS systems -depending on the job he's doing.

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  6. I was running defrag on the last drive I had in this computer mainly because the system had slowed way down and was giving errors. Fortunately I had backed up most of the stuff I didn't want to loose! Defrag is very hard on drives. Matter of fact it beats the hell out of them. If the drive is in bad shape it will probably do it in ahead of time.

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  7. BTW I mainly use Ubuntu Linux and likewise don't have to worry about it, but I do have a dual boot Windows XP and use it strictly for a couple of programs and to run Portableapps and MagicJack on.

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  8. Sixbears, I was dragged kicking and screaming from the old DOS days. Always said that "I don't do windows". But here I am, stuck with it.

    David, I didn't know it was hard on them. Why, doesn't it just copy stuff to blank areas and then pastes it where if should go after filling in some blank spots? If you copy everytingn from a drive to a back up system, the drive has to read the whole disk. Guess I don't understand why it would beat the hell out of them and backing one up doesn't. I am just so dumb sometimes. . .

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  9. DD, the way it works is data is stored on the drive and when some data is deleted then when something else is added windows writes part of it in the area where the last data was deleted from and then skips over to then next blank area and writes the rest of it or maybe part of it and then skips to the next blank area and does the same. Defragging actually sorts through all the data and keeps moving the fragments from one place to the other until it gets all of the data together for each file. That is the process that beats the hell out of a drive. Reading and writing so much until all of that gets done. Then the fragmenting process starts all over again. Once its done though it speeds up reading because the hard drive head doesn't have to keep jumping all over the disk to find all of the data it needs to read and same for writing back to the disk.

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  10. David, I know it would have to work hard when defragging, but maybe the work it saves when cleaned up makes the reader arms travels less in the the overall picture.

    Now, what does the disc cleanup program do? Just erease unused bytes? And does it hurt the hard drive?

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  11. I think you about have it there DD, mainly just delete junk files and so on. It doesn't defrag though. Sure if your drive can survive all the work the defrag does then it will help after its done, BUT old drives that aren't in very good shape may not survive the process. Best to backup data before you do it in that case.

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  12. I just defragged an external HD that had never been done. Boy! It sure took a long time!

    I put the main HD on a schedule, once a month; that’s the longest period I could choose, on win7.

    Back up is on auto pilot too. It backs up the entire hard drive including the operating system and settings. This will come in handy when my new internal HD arrives next week.

    This computer is only 2 years old and its just 24 Gb from being completely full. Funny, when I upgraded to the present laptop, I doubled the size of my old HD. This one is a 120 Gb but the next one is a 500 internal HD. That ought to last me awhile!

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  13. David, I have lost a lot of data before when I could no longer get a computer to function. Backup is the name of the game, for sure. I do not do it enough.

    Ernest, I don't think anyone ever has enough space. Like flat spots in my office. Anything surface that even resembles being fairly flat is piled high with stuff. Dang stuff.

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  14. I personally feel regardless of the size of the drive, they do need to be defragged. I've been defragging my drives using one of the popular automatic defraggers that runs in the background and runs in real time. As a result the data access is always smooth and lag free.

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  15. GNU, I agree. I have been defragging hard-drives for the last 20 years and never had one die on me. Just other problems.

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  16. Yes, my D is setup to mirror my C, but in answer to your question, all I do on my computer is write a blog, use search engines, and play games, mostly from software, but some online games. I just do mostly what a lot of other older travelers do. Lots of emails come through though. I have an external hard drive to store all my pictures on, so never leave a lot of them on here. Thanks for your help, as you can tell, I am computer challenged.

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  17. Pidge, me too, I am challenged for sure. Had a hard time learning to count on my fingers then tried to make the jump into computer land. . .

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