True Risks of Fragmentation

I know it's been debated adnauseum for years, but I've got debate going on with a fellow geek about just what are the true risks if you fail to defrag regularly (I usually do it once a week, AT LEAST once every 3 wks). I've read before that if left unattended for long enough you can actually damage the system files. As a pro-audio user that uses 250 - 450 Meg wav files over 8 tracks, with realtime FX, it's always been recommended to at least have a separate hard drive, and to defrag VERY often. But our real debate was if it truly damaged sys files if left unattended. I maintain they do.

Tanx,
KC

 

I'm not highly knowledgeable on defragmentation, but I like reading information about it.

I think it would be good practice to defrag regularly when working on very large files and like you are doing, keeping them on a separate drive.

System files...the main one of interest would be the pagefile. I couldn't see others getting fragmented, unless they were getting replaced with Windows Updates files.

I see (Windows) defrag does "Compacting Files" at the start of defrag. I am not really convinced why the compacted files need compacting and as soon as you run a rarely used process, will they need to be "decompacted" to run (thereby causing new fragmentation)?

Do you use Windows defrager or a third party program? I advise using one or the other, but not both. Each will have it's own method of locating files and you could do one after the other forever because they will rearrange the files differently.

Win 95, 98 had a full graphical image of defragmentation, I could sit there for hours watching it...I still miss it , they should have made it into a screen saver (mmm...maybe not so silly as it sounds).

If you have plenty of RAM to work on your large files it should not cause the pagefile to grow and shrink, thereby causing it to fragment. I have run a "method" of defragmenting the pagefile and it seems to work well, but if you look it up and try it, make sure you have plenty of RAM.

WATCH THE SPACE ON THE WINDOWS DRIVE. I know if you go under 15% free space under Windows XP,on the Windows drive, it won't run a defrag, so I recommend not going under 20% free space on that drive.

Some computers where I have worked never get a defragmentation run manually, although it is only recently I have come across people (new job) filling their Windows/only drive with large files. After they get to less than 10% free space on the drive, things start to slow down or crash and then you can't run a defrag unless they delete to 15% free space (....Temporary Internet Files are set to 10% and System Restore set to 12% by default).

Fragmentation makes the HDD work harder and because drive access is not a comparably "fast" system, it can also slow the system down. The system might slow down so much it makes the user complain or "look into it ". If there is not enough free space to defrag successfully, fragmentation, I expect, will only get worse and worse until the system can't work or you get error messages about the lack of space.

I don't know of anything that warns you that Windows XP (onwards) "needs" manual defragmentation, but I have seen it apparently badly needed occasionally with lots of red bars. Vista does not seem to give you any graphical representation of fragmentation, but allows you to run defrag as a scheduled task. If you run it as a task, look at how you want to run it as a priority. I always like background tasks to run as a low priority.

Matt

 

Me too, Matt.

 

That's typical marketing propaganda by makers of defrag programs. The facts are, the more you "open" a file, the greater risk of corruption. Defrag programs do more than just open files.

I'm with Steve - millions never defrag and have no problems. The key is free disk space. If you have lots of free disk space, defragging is not an essential task. But if the disk is crowded - especially if a system managed Page File is crowded in there too, you do everything you can to ease up some space, even the few Mb you get from a defrag can help.

This machine is pushing 7 years old - I think I have defragged 3 or 4 times - for sure immediately after the initial install/update/setup of Windows and the PC. Then after SP2, then again after SP3. See a pattern? Only after major changes to significant numbers of system files, did I run a defrag.

For Matt and Virgina, you might check out Defraggler from the makers of CCleaner. It has a familiar GUI (but still takes forever to defrag large drives - another reason to leave systems on 24/7 - to defrag at night).

WARNING: Two events in my career convinced me to NEVER run a computer without an UPS - once was while flashing a BIOS, the other when defragging a boot drive. Neither are good times for a power outage.

 

Auslogics Matt is fast and lets you look at the little squares changing.

 

I used to defrag all the time, too, but nowadays with 500GB drives, I don't bother much.

Diskeeper is kind of the gold standard amongst defraggers, and the latest three versions are designed to ALWAYS run in the background, but ONLY be actively defragging using its so-called InvisiTasking, which means it will only defrag when system resources are unused by you.

It's kind of cool to never have to configure it to defrag or anything else after you install and set it up once. However, there is a way where you can sit and watch it defrag one file after another with a nice-looking GUI.

Take care.

 

Yeah, I use Diskeeper too (2009 pro) and it's really great to not have to bother about defragging at all once you install it. Intelligent automatic background defrag takes care of everything without bothering you and there is no hit on system resources either.

As for corruption, it's unlikely that system files will be corrupted from fragmentation. The system will slow down (as I've experienced) but it will not be damaged. That said, in the days of pre-SP1 XP, IIRC, there was a problem where a highly fragmented MFT would render a system unbootable. If that happened, you had to download a special utility from MS called bcupdate.exe or something like that and run it to fix the MFT. I think that is not a problem now with the current MS OSs.

 

Fragmentation, no matter how bad, is no indication of corruption. It simply means the hard drive must jump around the drive to read in the file fragments - something hard drives are very capable of doing.

 

A similar thread I am working on elsewhere triggered a thought I decided to pass along here.

Understand that many, including myself, feel that these constant or automatic defragging programs are more counterproductive than productive for many reasons, but most importantly, because they are inefficient, and introduce more inefficiencies. You should NEVER defrag a hard drive without first deleting the potentially 1000s of tiny Temporary Internet Files, unneeded cookies, etc. currently scattered about the disk. These real-time, (or upon boot) defrag programs do not account for them, but must deal with them, so they simply plug them in holes like any other file, breaking up possible large segments of contiguous space better used by more permanent files.

It is counterproductive to defrag with, perhaps, 30 days worth of Restore Points saved on the disk. It can be counterproductive to defrag with a system managed page file - especially on a crowded disk.

Finally, these programs consume system resources needed by the operating system, all those security programs badguys have forced us to use, and the programs we normally run. And they also keep the harddrive running unnecessarily, swinging the read/write heads back and forth, back and forth all the time - this contributes to heat in the drive and case, and added wear and tear on the mechanical assemblies.

 

Who? lol

Yeah, I guess this went a bit OT - sorry about that.

 

If a defragger defrags in the background constantly then it's definitely not a good thing, and a waste of resources. I don't know about the other auto defraggers, but the one I use (Diskeeper '09) doesn't do that. It runs only for a few minutes a day to clear up fragments, and always gives priority to other applications since it uses only idle resources. You can also restrict it's operation to specific time slots, but I don't use that function. overall, it's very convenient since I don't ever have to bother defragging my 5 drives

I have also added the internet browser cache folders to the exclusion list, so those files are not defragged.

Virus scans, I run only once a week, usually scheduled for saturday early mornings when I am not using the system, and so far my setup works quite well.

 

And once again, do you purge your system of clutter before it clears up those fragments? And while it may not be defragging constantly, some scheduler is running to let it know when it can jump in there. I am sure it is not hogging resources, but they are lost none the less.

Once a year is too often? Seriously, unless you are constantly installing and uninstalling massive programs with 100s of files on all your drives, the majority of the files should just sit there, and never need to move, or become fragmented. This is why only after major changes (like Service Patches), should one be required (more frequently on crowded boot disks).

Making the defrag program work around 1000s of tiny temporary files! Sure you want to do that? Not me.

Again, I can see the need for more frequent defragging on small, crowded boot drives, but not everyday, and not with lots of free space. As mentioned above, there are many folks out there who never defrag.

And if you keep an antimalware solution running full full time, and avoid sites badguys wallow in (illegal p-rn, gambling, and P2P sites that tolerate illegal filesharing of copyrighted materials), then running scans once a week is fine. In fact, that is a schedule I recommend for most. But I also recommend purging the hard drives of clutter first.

 

Would like to add my two bits here for what its worth.

Fragmentation NEVER corrupts files. It just slows them down & may reduce the lifespan of your hard disk.

The only other serious problem with fragmentation is of file recovery. Chances of full recovery [with any utility] are more if the file is in contiguous space than if its all over the place.

 

That is if the loss is due to disk failure.

 

What if you delete files ?

 

I don't understand your question. If you delete a file, the file is still there - only the space is marked as free. Whether you can recover it or not depends more on how the disk was used after deletion. As far as the recovery program, it does not care if it has to move to the adjacent cluster, or one across the disk to find the next fragment.

 

True - but I suspect most into that, do so on a secondary drive, separate from the OS, or the PF - so again, if there is plenty of free disk space, frequent defragging will have marginal effect, if any, in "perceived" performance.