From: HeyBub on
Lisa wrote:
> I was told by a computer repairman that it's not necessary to defrag
> my laptop. If the hard drive gets full, remove files and always make
> sure I'm using a virus protection.
> What are your thoughts?

I can envision a situation in a data center with hundreds of thousands of
transactions per minute where defragging may be of some slight benefit
(assuming an NTFS file system).

I can also imagine a user devoted to daily defragging experiencing a power
interruption during a critical directory manipulation process.


From: Leythos on
In article <#1wndj28KHA.3176(a)TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>, heybub(a)gmail.com
says...
>
> Lisa wrote:
> > I was told by a computer repairman that it's not necessary to defrag
> > my laptop. If the hard drive gets full, remove files and always make
> > sure I'm using a virus protection.
> > What are your thoughts?
>
> I can envision a situation in a data center with hundreds of thousands of
> transactions per minute where defragging may be of some slight benefit
> (assuming an NTFS file system).
>
> I can also imagine a user devoted to daily defragging experiencing a power
> interruption during a critical directory manipulation process.

On a small computer with many add/delete/grow/shrink operations, defrag
can significantly impact file access times and can be very noticeable to
users if their system was badly file fragmented before the defrag.

White-Space fragmention is not normally an issue, but a file that is
fragmented into 8000 parts will have an impact on system performance.

This argument has gone on for decades, but it's the people that maintain
systems across many areas that know the benefits of defrag.

--
You can't trust your best friends, your five senses, only the little
voice inside you that most civilians don't even hear -- Listen to that.
Trust yourself.
spam999free(a)rrohio.com (remove 999 for proper email address)
From: Db on
I think the question is
a little ridiculous.

you should do your own
analysis and determine if
defrag is beneficial for
you and your system.

---------------------
the train of thought is that
most computers have
faster and larger hard drives
with "lots" of room in the
gigabytes and terabytes

and because there is plenty
of room for fragmented files
and disk access speeds are
very fast, defragging
has little affect on performance.

however, there was a time
that small hard drives did
require defragging.

in my opinion, if the amount
of data has not exceeded
50% of the disk, then you
may be wasting your time
in defragging.

but the above is subjective
and there is really no rule
of thumb and you will have
to determine if your disk
needs defrag or not.

on the other hand, if your
tripping an acid, then it may
be entertaining to stare at the
defrag screen and watch all
the colorful little blocks move
around.

~db


"Lisa" <Lisa(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:1AA94818-B553-4478-9F58-668B6F68C348(a)microsoft.com...
> I was told by a computer repairman that it's not necessary to defrag my
> laptop. If the hard drive gets full, remove files and always make sure
> I'm
> using a virus protection.
> What are your thoughts?

From: Leythos on
In article <8BE3710B-3210-4A30-9770-A8B5E56D1715(a)microsoft.com>,
databaseben(a)sbcglobal.net says...
>
> in my opinion, if the amount
> of data has not exceeded
> 50% of the disk, then you
> may be wasting your time
> in defragging.
>

And that's why people don't really pay attention to what you post here
DB.

It's not about how much free space you have left on the disk, since free
space has little to do with fragmentation, other than making it worse
when you have less free space.

What does impact fragmentation is the number of ADD/DELETE/SIZE Changes
you make to the files on the drive.

I've seen a single PDF, on a drive with 800GB free space, fragmented
into 29,000 parts. It would take up to a minute to load, after the
defrag it took a few seconds...

--
You can't trust your best friends, your five senses, only the little
voice inside you that most civilians don't even hear -- Listen to that.
Trust yourself.
spam999free(a)rrohio.com (remove 999 for proper email address)
From: John on
I'm curious. How did you know the file is fragmented into x parts? What
software did you use to see this fragmentation?

"Leythos" <spam999free(a)rrohio.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.2657727c502cb8cd98a360(a)us.news.astraweb.com...
>
> I've seen a single PDF, on a drive with 800GB free space, fragmented
> into 29,000 parts. It would take up to a minute to load, after the
> defrag it took a few seconds...