I just finished defragmenting the hard drive on my Dell Inspiron Laptop, which I’ve had for a couple of years. I confess I’ve not used the defragmenter before–it seemed to take more time than I could spare. However, today I had lots of time on my hands so I ran it, and it took four hours! Is this average, or is it my fault for waiting this long to do it? :o
I didn’t know people still defragged. IIRC if you haven’t done it in a long time, that seems right. Hard drives are big now and with the computer probably doing stuff in the backround, yeah that seems right. If you don’t want it to take as long, maybe do it every few months or so.
Yeah, if it’s a decent-sized drive, and you haven’t done it in a long time (or ever), it can take a while. For most things, i find that some file fragmentation doesn’t really slow the system down much, if at all. One exception, in my experience, is on the partitions i use for large media files—video files, photoshop documents, etc. I find that those big files are often easier to open and work on if you defragment every so often.
Just FYI, i’m a fan of the Defraggler third-party defragmentation utility. It’s freeware, and is made by Piriform, the same folks who do the excellent CCleaner optimization tool.
Defraggler works faster than the native defrag utility in Windows (at least in my experience), and it also lets you defrag individual files if you want to do that.
Oof, it can make a world of difference for games, in fact, Steam has a built in debugger because of how bad it can get. I optimized my load times for Team Fortress 2 from about a minute and a half (or more, time dilates to about 8x normal size when waiting for a computer to load so I may be a little under since I’m rounding my perception way down) to under 15 seconds by hitting the defrag button and letting it work. (And like you said, things like rendering videos and such can be a pain with a fragmented drive too).
In addition, I think Windows Vista is set by default to defrag every Wednesday at 1AM or some such if you leave your computer on, and I wouldn’t be surprised if XP SP3 added a similar feature. Never be afraid to defrag, it’s not like the old days where touching your computer made the defrag utility yell at you (Ugh, I remember when I had to turn off my screen saver to defrag because if you so much as nudged the computer or let it go to sleep your defrag would fail on the odd occasion), it runs quite nicely in the background and you can still surf the web or do whatever well using it with a minimal impact on performace (the only things I wouldn’t recommend doing while defragging is playing instense games).
But yeah, it is pretty much your fault for waiting, all that moving and deleting over the course of two years leaves it pretty fragmented, especially on a larger drive.
laptop drives are also much slower, extending this time more.
Try a different defragmenter.
I suggest the Auslogics Disk Defragmenter. I’ve found it to be free, and significantly faster than the Windows default.
I don’t understand why you needed to have “time on your hands” to defrag a drive. Can’t you just run it while you go eat/sleep/watch a movie/read a book/plot to take over the world? That’s what I usually do.
Vista defragments drives automatically in the background.
BTW if you have a SSD, don’t defragment!
Another defrager is JkDefrag. I too find this and the other defragers do their thing faster than the native windows defrager. I would like to know why?
Surprise, surprise! You found some Windows software that wasn’t well written! :rolleyes:
I can tell you one reason somebody needs to plan before a defrag. It can make disk access almost halt for what your doing. It also can take a big chunk of the CPU cycles.
As I understand it, the defragging utility built into Windows is either a license of the Peter Norton program or something that emulates it. And something that was an optional choice in the Norton program that seems to be a mandatory part of defragging with the one packaged in Windows OS installations, is to rewrite the drive to put OS and commonly used files (MSWord.exe, freecell.exe, spellcheck.dll…) in the ‘early’, easy-access part of the disk. So one of the first steps is to sequentially clear out whatever’s there and write the files it sees on the system history as being often used in their place. As you can imagine, this takes far longer than merely accumulating the scattered bits of a given 1.3 MB file and writing it somewhere there’s 1.3 MB of contiguous space free.
FYI: Many MS-Windows versions (including XP) use a version of Diskeeper, not Norton Speed Disk. They sell their own version and, IMHO, it’s just as awful as the MS version. Plus they lost a “k”.
One of the real problems with defraggers is the “multi-move” aspect. I watch the maps and see things being moved all over the place again and again. Not smart.
There are better defraggers out there. And I’ve been working on computers for years and have yet to see any computer’s performance being improved by defragging. Maybe back in the DOS days, but not now.
The only time defragging makes some sense is if the hard drive is nearly fully. However, if you’re a that stage, you’re probably better off adding another hard drive.
The last time I used a defrager (probably Norton Utilities) was on a 386 which had a 120MB hard drive compressed with Stacker. Back then it did make a small difference in speed and the drives were so small it usually took less than an hour to defrag.
Now I cringe at the thought of defragging my 1TB drives.
As i said, in my experience it definitely makes a difference with very large media files, especially when you’ve made a lot of edits to them. Also, Windows Movie Maker is notorious, particularly with AVI files, for crashing if you import and try to edit heavily fragmented files.
For everyday stuff like word processing documents, spreadsheets, small databases, etc., i never notice any performance improvement from defragging.
The big drives in my computer are split into smaller partitions, and i just defrag one partition at a time. Also, i tend to reserve particular partitions for the types of media files where defragging makes the most difference; i defrag my media partitions every weeks or so; the other partitions are lucky if they get done every couple of months.
Wow, that takes me back. You must really be an oldtimer. Back then Norton Utilities was a pretty good thing, and speeddisk was fun to watch. My first PC was a 286 with a huge 10mb HDD. Well, my third actually, my first was a Commodore Vic-20, the second a Commodore 128. No hard drives on them but external floppy drives were available. 
I see big differences in boot and shut down times and corrupted files when defrag is left too long… Cloning is a lot better with a defraged HD also.
I’m a cheap guy so I don’t leave my stuff on 24/7. Old school also. Works for me…
I used to take the advice of all the experts and gurus about not doing routine maintenance. I finally quit when none of them would pay for the damage their suggestion caused… If I break it, I can only be mad at me… Works out better that way…
As I understand it, when your drive gets fragmented, bits and pieces of files get stored in different places. Kind of like a Tetris game, where you have all different colors of pieces all over the place, with large and small gaps in between. What defrag does is, it takes the bits and pieces (like files from the same app that have been stored in different places or larger files that have been stored in bits and pieces in different places), and puts them all together. Like if you took all the Tetris pieces and put all the blue ones together with no gaps, all the red ones together with no gaps, etc.
Still not with me? Ok, it groups the files from programs together, and puts the stuff you access most up front where it can be accessed faster. The longer you go without a defrag, the more scattered your files are going to be, and the more errors you’re going to get as your drive spins around like crazy trying to locate said files. That makes your defrag take much longer. If you defrag once a month instead of once a year, it will take much less time, maybe an hour or less.
In answer to the title of the OP (if not the substance): Basically disk defragmenting takes a long time because it involves more hard drive operations than just about any operation a home user would do.
Operating systems work by keeping a table of which blocks on the hard drive are in use, and which files / folders the used blocks belong to.
Many operations that the OS has to do are done in a lazy way. For example, when you delete a file from your recycle bin, does Windows write over the file on the hard drive with zeroes? No; it just changes the entries in its table from “used” blocks to “free” blocks.
Likewise, when you move a file, Windows may simply change a few entries in its table, and leave the file as it is on the disk.
However, disk defragmenting is basically a worst case for the OS. It can’t just rearrange its table; that wouldn’t help. It has no option but to read all the data from a block, copy it into memory, seek to somewhere else on the disk, read what’s there into memory, then write over it with the data from memory, rinse and repeat.
And this for hundreds of gigs of data.