I think it's inevitable.
Spinning discs for home use are going the same way that floppys did.
It won't be long before before every home computer will come with a SSD as standard, and it will only be enthusiasts that still have spinners, and those mainly as external drives.
A lot of new laptops don't have much of a storage drive at all, they have a drive for the OS (usually a SSD) and store your data in the cloud.
So the mass market for defragmenters is dwindling fast.
aah... too bad
though I am told not to..
I still quick defrag my NVMe boot device... and so far have only used 7 or 8 TB written out of 600TB max life span..
and I have two WD Black HDDs I find it give me better performance in terms of defragging.. to be my NTFS file systems optimized....
my DELL gaming laptop has a 512GB NVMe storage device..
One thing with SSDs is that, along with Trim and Garbage Collection, they use 'wear levelling'. It's built into the drive.
That spreads data writes about the drive so that all parts of it get used (worn) at about the same rate, rather than one part getting more heavily used than the rest.
To a defragmenting programme wear levelling is fragmentation - but with a SSD it's fragmentation that you want to happen to prolong the life of the drive.
aah... yeah.. hmm...
That is where Defraggler could use some improvements I guess..
optimizing the SSD/NVMe devices...
I tried to do a quick optimize but it didn't move or defrag any files... that were fragmented...
is it not suppose to?
all I can do is move to end of drive or quick defrag to the closest to the start of the device...
btw I have a bug report my WD Element 2TB external USB HDD is showing up as a SSD to Defraggler for some reason...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06W55K9N6/?th=1
That's the url to the store page for it if your interest in specs..
37 minutes ago, nukecad said:<div class="ipsQuote_contents ipsClearfix" data-gramm="false"> <p> One thing with SSDs is that, along with Trim and Garbage Collection, they use 'wear levelling'. It's built into the drive. </p> <p> That spreads data writes about the drive so that all parts of it get used (worn) at about the same rate, rather than one part getting more heavily used than the rest. </p> <p> To a defragmenting programme wear levelling is fragmentation - but with a SSD it's fragmentation that you want to happen to prolong the life of the drive. </p> <p> <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling" ipsnoembed="true" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling</a> </p> </div>
I have to beg to differ with parts of this.... the third line actually... the first half...
Wear levelling is not seen by the operating system, NTFS, or any defragging software. NTFS, or FAT, allocates a cluster number to a file which remains unchanged for the life of the file, unless some user/client action (such as a defrag) occurs. Defraggers get their fragmentation information from the MFT, not from the disk, i.e. how many datarun entries there are in the MFT record for a file. What physical pages on an SSD are actually allocated is anyone's guess.
1 minute ago, Augeas said:<div class="ipsQuote_contents"> <p> I have to beg to differ with parts of this.... the third line actually... the first half... </p> <p> Wear levelling is not seen by the operating system, NTFS, or any defragging software. NTFS, or FAT, allocates a cluster number to a file which remains unchanged for the life of the file, unless some user/client action (such as a defrag) occurs. Defraggers get their fragmentation information from the MFT, not from the disk, i.e. how many datarun entries there are in the MFT record for a file. What physical pages on an SSD are actually allocated is anyone's guess. </p> </div>
interesting.
Agreed, intetesting.
Guess I need to look again at wear levelling. (or maybe at where defragmenters get their information from, which of course may/will be different for different defragmenters).
Although, as I said in a different thread. I've come to the opinion that defragmenting of any drive is not realy needed (and hasn't been for a couple of decades).
If you didn't have a defragmenter showing you a drive map you would never notice any difference in performance - which is one reason why the built in Windows tool no longer shows you a drive map.
Wear levelling is entirely within the SSD and under the control of the aptly named SSD controller. If you can see what's in the Flash Translation Layer you're probably in a research lab.
If a defragger looked at a disk, looking only at allocated clusters as defined in the cluster bit map, it would just see endless clusters of meaningless data. Where does a file start, and end, and are those thousand clusters in a row all one file, or file fragments, or what? There's no way to know. So defraggers look at the MFT (ignoring FAT for the moment). On;y there is the connection between file and data clusters, and only there are file fragments defined and located.
Fragmentation does not (can't) happen with SSDs in the way HDDs do, if anything it shortens its lifespan when used, you should only TRIM SSDs (Windows does this automatically or you can check under disk options/tools/optimize).
Not too sure what "SSD optimizer" apps do exactly, like Auslogics', but I guess they just trigger the TRIM command.
Fragmentation on an SSD happens exactly the same as it does on an HDD. Fragmentation is a file with its data spread across multiple and separate groups of clusters, or pages, and it's the file system that determines that. It happens in the same way whether the storage device is an HDD or an SSD, although the consequences may be different.
Piriform, you say you have updated Defraggler for business..?!
why no updates for general release?
please don't abandon your customers I paid once for Defraggler a long time ago..
there is no point to pay for it since you have made no updates in years... :(
bumping my thread.
still no updates to Defraggler released to the general public..
I am so sad. ?
5th year, and large hard drive users like myself would like some improvements. I would buy the Biz version if your website showed that it had more features. Performance is important for video editing, dropping to 20% on a fragmented drive. I already use SSD pairs to bounce edits, but on a productive day, I can generate / replace 1TB or more of files. Making the drives larger just exacerbates the problem (ie RAID of 2-5 drives, striping, etc), increases the peak speed but does not decrease the defrag time.
1) Please allow processing more than one drive at a time. Exists in competitive software.
2) Proper multi-thread support to process the file/fragment sorting operations in parallel.
3) Increase the allowed amount of files being read/written so that scatter-gather can increase the throughput. On 32GB machine, only 300MB used (apparently). I see some defrag software do long read/write operations under some circumstances, much faster than reading and writing single small files.
4) Decide whether moving the next 50,000 semi-consecutive files one at a time is slower than reading them all at once, and writing them in a consolidated block is faster. Making use of the hard drive's internal DRAM for read-ahead makes sense to speed up the software. I know it would be fast, because on an SSD you can move 500MB/sec or more.
At >3 days per drive (70% used 12TB, not even the latest 24TB) capable of 220MB/s, it takes 10 hours to copy the drive to an empty one, and 10 hours to copy it back. Need to do this type of defrag once a month or so. Consolidation (full or fragmented) is important because writing new files scatters into all the potholes. It shouldn't take an hour to do a fast consolidation.
I would put $100 on the table for 2 or more of the above.
2 years after no updates someone from piriform said "quite the contrary of abandoned" - in reality 6 years later still no updates so it's obviously abandoned
11 minutes ago, menthor said:<div class="ipsQuote_contents"> <p> 2 years after no updates someone from piriform said "quite the contrary of abandoned" - in reality 6 years later still no updates so it's obviously abandoned </p> </div>
yup.. its sad because I still use Defraggler every day...
and I don't know of any other good defragging tools I can use.. lol
as good as defraggler..
Glary utilities is much faster, but not as accurate nor flexible. I end up using 3 tools to scrub system drive and 3 tools to fix massively fragmented drives after astrophotography explosion of multiple files per frame of a 100Mpixel camera. Both 2TB M.2 and 12TB HDD are needed for scratch files.
Glary defrag gets 10k files scrunched in less than 5 mins. Then Defraggler for the 50 remaining massive OS and protected files, then a reboot defrag for the MFT etc.
When done working, I move the files to a 3rd drive and a NAS for backup, delete the temp files and start over.
It's 20 hours of intensive disk work of terabytes of temp files.
4 hours ago, HSchulze said:<div class="ipsQuote_contents"> <p> Glary utilities is much faster, but not as accurate nor flexible. </p> </div>
In that case I will stick with Defraggler then... lol
but thx anyway.
Allot of defrag tools are now several years old at this point. Be happy that it still works in modern OSes, and in particular if it doesn't crash. The crashing is why I don't bother with Defraggler at all, although I do have it archived on several external backup disks.
Perhaps the lack of updates in many defrag tools has something to do with the adoption of SSDs, and their price drop over the years.
2 hours ago, Andavari said:Allot of defrag tools are now several years old at this point......
Perhaps the lack of updates in many defrag tools has something to do with the adoption of SSDs
I think that it's more to do with the fact that defragging is defragging - so what is there to be updated?
When something already works as well as it can then there is nothing to be fixed or 'made better'.
Unless the technology of spinning drives has a startling new innovation, or someone comes up with a magic way to do defrags differently, then all that is left for any 'update' is to mess about with the user interface.
(And then many will shout ‘I don’t like this new look, can we have the old familiar look back?’).
The problem is the size of files and HDDs are increasing so poorly threaded software using 1 or 2 of 16 or more cores and getting 20MB/s on a 220MB/s drive is inefficient and slow. It's almost faster to copy the remaining files from one HDD to an empty one. If I had RAID10 it wouldn't go much faster, but take 5x longer. Background defragmentation starts to make sense.