Defraggler is FRAGGLING!

tbb043

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I don't think I've ever defragged (or even defraggled, lol Fraggles in a drive, there's an amusing image) my 1TB drive I use for 360, Wii, and PS3. Or any of my other drives in years. Drive sizes just got so big that it took so long that I just said meh, forget it. I haven't noticed any problems as a result. Not saying it wouldn't work better if everything was contiguous, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

My dad actually "killed" one of his Macs 10-15 years ago while defragging the drive. Gave me tons of fuel for our Mac vs PC feud for a few years.
 

the_randomizer

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Because they think of the Win95 times and of their awesome PIO1 hard drives which had read/write speeds of 1MB/s. In that case the drop to 0.2MB/s was quite noticeable.

As I linked, Win7 automatically defrags. Auslogics and Defraggler are nowadays "useless" but want users to think that they're still useful or relevant for obvious reasons: i.e. not going out of business. You said HDTune found some bad sectors - those are to blame, not fragmentation.


It works in the background, eating away the "idle time" of your CPU. It won't swamp your PC ;O;

"Inevitable full defrag", read above. There isn't a difference between "background defrag" and "full-time defrag", they BOTH do the same thing. If you don't believe in background defragging, then you shouldn't waste your time with "full-time" defragging as well :P

EDIT: Some hard proof:
http://www.hofmannc.de/en/windows-7-defragmenter-test/benchmarks.html

Unless you really spend your time on your PC with a stopwatch in your hand, you won't notice the difference. EVER.


So how often should I schedule Windows 7 to defrag the HDD? Weekly, monthly? And what can I do about the bad HDD sectors? I sure as hell don't have the funds to get a new drive anytime soon, there's always SSD but that's even more, but I believe the issue I have on the PC is software-related.
 

raulpica

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So how often should I schedule Windows 7 to defrag the HDD? Weekly, monthly? And what can I do about the bad HDD sectors? I sure as hell don't have the funds to get a new drive anytime soon, there's always SSD but that's even more, but I believe the issue I have on the PC is software-related.
It's automatically set to happen every night - don't mess with it, it's already fine.

Bad Sectors means your drive is going sour. You risk losing all the data on it in any moment, so never keep anything important on it. No way to fix them, you need a new drive. An SSD is a better investment in terms of longevity.
 

Foxi4

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It's automatically set to happen every night - don't mess with it, it's already fine.
Serious talk? It's pretty naive to think along your lines raupica, really. Say, you put a big (several gigabytes) file on your drive - it's going to fall between the gaps for sure, and no amount of background defragmenting can fix that. I've fooled around with computers for quite a long time now and even those with the background defragmenter enabled suffered from fragmentation issues. A thorough defragmentation script that takes into account gaps between files and platter zones can take several hours, sometimes a whole day. That, and we'd have to assume that your CPU has enough "Idle" cycles to handle the background task, which it often doesn't on gaming PC's or on PC's of power users who turn on their computer specifically to perform a relatively compex task. Background defragmenting may very well work on an office computer that's limited to running a web browser and an office suite all day long, but it's not ideal for all users.
 

raulpica

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Serious talk? It's pretty naive to think along your lines raupica, really. Say, you put a big (several gigabytes) file on your drive - it's going to fall between the gaps for sure, and no amount of background defragmenting can fix that. I've fooled around with computers for quite a long time now and even those with the background defragmenter enabled suffered from fragmentation issues. A thorough defragmentation script that takes into account gaps between files and platter zones can take several hours, sometimes a whole day. That, and we'd have to assume that your CPU has enough "Idle" cycles to handle the background task, which it often doesn't on gaming PC's or on PC's of power users who turn on their computer specifically to perform a relatively compex task. Background defragmenting may very well work on an office computer that's limited to running a web browser and an office suite all day long, but it's not ideal for all users.
Yes. It'll get fragmented. The problem is your base assumption - and that is that fragmentation is THAT much of a problem.

You've seen the benchmarks, that's hard proof and the difference is negligible - your positive experience in seeing an improvement after running huge defragmentation scripts could just be placebo effect :)

tl;dr: Yes, defragmentation exists, and will keep existing but it won't change your life.
 

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Yes. It'll get fragmented. The problem is your base assumption - and that is that fragmentation is THAT much of a problem. You've seen the benchmarks, that's hard proof and the difference is negligible - your positive experience could just be placebo effect :) tl;dr: Yes, defragmentation exists, and will keep existing but it won't change your life.
The computer I'm running right now hasn't been optimized with my magic tricks, actually - Windows 8.1 hasn't given me any reasons to alter it to my advantage yet. :P
 
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the_randomizer

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It's automatically set to happen every night - don't mess with it, it's already fine.

Bad Sectors means your drive is going sour. You risk losing all the data on it in any moment, so never keep anything important on it. No way to fix them, you need a new drive. An SSD is a better investment in terms of longevity.


Issue resolved, HDD in working order and OS functioning properly, did a thorough chkdsk, it only found three bad sectors and fixed them ^_^ Set to happen every night, didn't know that. I thought constantly defragging it added wear and tear?
 

raulpica

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Issue resolved, HDD in working order and OS functioning properly, did a thorough chkdsk, it only found three bad sectors and fixed them ^_^ Set to happen every night, didn't know that. I thought constantly defragging it added wear and tear?
You got lucky that it was only 3 sectors. Every HD comes with a few "spare" sectors chkdsk can reallocate bad sectors to. When you run out of them, then SHIT GETS REAL. Anyway, keep a close eye on it, as with normal use new ones could pop up and if something happens and you've already used all the spare sectors, you're going to face total drive corruption (most of the times the data can still be recovered, keep that in mind).

Yeah, it does, but mechanical hard drives have ridicolously long endurance (read/write cycles), so it's okay.
 

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You got lucky that it was only 3 sectors. Every HD comes with a few "spare" sectors chkdsk can reallocate bad sectors to. When you run out of them, then SHIT GETS REAL. Anyway, keep a close eye on it, as with normal use new ones could pop up and if something happens and you've already used all the spare sectors, you're going to face total drive corruption (most of the times the data can still be recovered, keep that in mind).

Yeah, it does, but mechanical hard drives have ridicolously long endurance (read/write cycles), so it's okay.


Not only that, but I managed to also backup the files that were giving me trouble, but much to my joy, the files that were corrupted were fixed. I assume what the OS does is takes the bad sectors, fills them with zeroes, right? Or at least marks them to tell the OS not to use those sectors again, I think. On the bright side, at least I don't have a Seagate.
 

raulpica

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Not only that, but I managed to also backup the files that were giving me trouble, but much to my joy, the files that were corrupted were fixed. I assume what the OS does is takes the bad sectors, fills them with zeroes, right? Or at least marks them to tell the OS not to use those sectors again, I think. On the bright side, at least I don't have a Seagate.
Most of the times, if you can recover them it means that the files that appear "corrupted" are just "misaligned" by the filesystem. It's a mild form of data corruption, which is luckily enough easy to fix.

BTW keep in mind that bad sectors might just be a sign of something going bad in your drive. If you see more popping up in a month or so it'd be better to start saving some money. Anyway, enough off-topic :P This thread was about fragmentation!
 

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