Have you ever noticed a significant improvement after defragging?

euser1984

I haven't done it in ages and don't need to anymore because I have an ssd. I do come across a lot of machines with disk drives still.

I recall that defragging in the past made very little improvement....I know it depends on what you have on the disk etc...some programs I would have been using though would have most likely been fragmented.

What do people think? Thanks.

CreepingDeath

euser1984 wrote: »

I haven't done it in ages and don't need to anymore because I have an ssd. I do come across a lot of machines with disk drives still.

I recall that defragging in the past made very little improvement....I know it depends on what you have on the disk etc...some programs I would have been using though would have most likely been fragmented.

What do people think? Thanks.

Depends on a lot of factors, but it's definitely worth defragging.
It consolidates free space on your drive, so the swap space isn't spread over non-contiguous parts of the drive.
Although I always explicitly set the min & max size of the Windows swap file to the same value, so it shouldn't be dynamically increased/decreased by Windows and should allocate it all in one nice block.

But if you don't want a full defrag I used to run PageDefrag which defragmented the paging file on every reboot, and Ccleaner cleaned up redundant entries in the Windows registry file.

Another side effect that defragging has is that it effectively reads and rewrites your entire drive. If the drive controller detects too many read errors on one sector that it has to autocorrect, then it'll mark that sector as bad and move the data to a new sector. So in a way it can help refresh the disk and detect any sectors about to go bad.

Steve Gibson from the Security Now podcast wrote SpinRite, which performs a lot of low level hard disk operations to attempt to retreive data from bad hard drives, so he knews what he's talking about.

ZENER

Also remember that windows sets a schedule for automatically defragmenting your drive when it's first installed. It's not clever enough to realise an SSD is installed either. So if you do have a Solid State Drive in your computer then disable the defrag in windows scheduler.

Ken

euser1984

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Depends on a lot of factors, but it's definitely worth defragging.
It consolidates free space on your drive, so the swap space isn't spread over non-contiguous parts of the drive.
Although I always explicitly set the min & max size of the Windows swap file to the same value, so it shouldn't be dynamically increased/decreased by Windows and should allocate it all in one nice block.

But if you don't want a full defrag I used to run PageDefrag which defragmented the paging file on every reboot, and Ccleaner cleaned up redundant entries in the Windows registry file.

Another side effect that defragging has is that it effectively reads and rewrites your entire drive. If the drive controller detects too many read errors on one sector that it has to autocorrect, then it'll mark that sector as bad and move the data to a new sector. So in a way it can help refresh the disk and detect any sectors about to go bad.

Steve Gibson from the Security Now podcast wrote SpinRite, which performs a lot of low level hard disk operations to attempt to retreive data from bad hard drives, so he knews what he's talking about.

Given all the technicalities aside though, I've never noticed a performance increase and this is going back as far as Windows 98 I think.

ZENER wrote: »

Also remember that windows sets a schedule for automatically defragmenting your drive when it's first installed. It's not clever enough to realise an SSD is installed either. So if you do have a Solid State Drive in your computer then disable the defrag in windows scheduler.

Ken

Great tip! I just switched it off. Karma to you my man

Overheal

ZENER wrote: »

Also remember that windows sets a schedule for automatically defragmenting your drive when it's first installed. It's not clever enough to realise an SSD is installed either. So if you do have a Solid State Drive in your computer then disable the defrag in windows scheduler.

Ken

back in Vista and in the early parts of seven that was true but with Windows 8 it is intelligent enough to recognize a solid-state drive and you'll notice that defrag scheduling does not occur on the drive. The utility may still be scheduled to run but it does not actually do anything on an SSD once detected as such. Also true of defraggler. I prefer to install that, it also overrides the OS defrag utility, essentially overwrites it

ZENER

From what I've read online if you install Windows 8 to an SSD then it will realise the presence of the SSD when it runs the first WEI (Windows Experience Index) which it does automatically after an install, so all good. But if you had installed it on a traditional drive and then move it to an SSD using a cloner then unless the WEI is run again it won't detect the SSD and will continue to run a defrag.

Also, once Windows has detected the presence of the SSD it uses the Defragmentation schedule to sent TRIM hints to the SSD. So it seems that disabling defrag will prevent it from doing this ! All very confusing !

Interesting discussion on the procedure here.

Ken

Steviemoyne

Does anyone have concrete knowledge regarding what I'm about to say:

I was always under the impression that you don't need to defragment an SSD because the data isn't spread over disks. I've no complex knowledge of hard drives or anything like that, it's just my gut feeling based on things I've read.

Windows 7 also automatically defrags but it seems disabled on my SSD out of the box like what ZENER said above.

Lundar.

you don't need to defrag a SSD

The short answer is this: you don't have to defrag your SSD.

To understand why, we need to look at the purpose of defragmenting. Defragging ensures that large files are stored in one continuous area of a hard disc driveso that it can be read in one go. Mechanical drives have a relatively long seek time of approximately 15ms, so every time a file is fragmented you lose 15ms finding the next one, And this really adds up when reading lots of different files split into lots of different fragments.

However, this isn't an issue with SSDs, because the seek time is about 0.1ms. You aren't really going to notice the benefit of defragged files--which means defragging has no performance advantages with an SSD.

An SSD moves data that's already happily on your disk to other places on your disk, often sticking it at a temporary position first. Thats's what gives defragmenting a disadvantage for SSD users You're writing data you already have, which uses up some of the NAND's limited rewrite capability, -- with no performance advantage to be gained from it.

So basically, don't defrag your drive because at best it won't do anything, at worst it does nothing for your performance and you will use up write cycles doing it. Having done it a few times ain't gonna cause you much trouble, but you don't want this to be a scheduled, weekly type thing.

Source

beauf

Used to notice it more years ago. These days only notice it on machines full of junk. Its not a massive difference kinda 5% but then do a few things that give you 5% they all add up especially on an older machine.

You get similar effect moving files to another drive then back again.

Though at that point your probably be better off doing a reinstall.