Fragmentation and slowdown

[tolyanki]

We have a network of systems at our school and have all the popular system maintenance programs installed on them. I recently came across an article on PC WORLD called 15 TechMyths which talks of deframentation not showing noticeable performance improvement. I find this hard to believe as our drives get fragmented pretty fast and we do notice problems like hangs and slowdown which are solved after CCleaner and defrag. I'd like to know viewpoints on this.

[Humpty]

Welcome to the forum tolyanki

 

These are age old arguments but I have to agree with your observations that a cleanup - defrag is a good thing.

 

One aspect of a cleanup is that any security scan won't have to scan useless files so it can finish quicker and a defrag won't have to defrag those same useless files.

 

As for a speedup I can't really tell and I doubt if it's perceptible on a modern machine as they work in a blink anyways.

[lotse]

I always understood defragmentation decreases the time it take your system to read a file, therefore making everyday activities such as launching new programs faster.

 

It certainly made a perceptable difference to my old XP and windows 98 machines. I have diskeeper working continously in the background on my vista PC, so I haven't noticed any loss or gain in terms of speed.

 

I will to continue to use a deframention tool.

[xxxxsh4d0wxxxx]

I agree with everything stated above, and I would like to point out (which is quite obvious) that a school's hard disk would most likely fragment a lot faster because of the constant file addition/deletion, ect.

 

I could be wrong, but that is my theory.

[rridgely]

Personally as I've said before I find defragmentation slow down to be minimal, insignificant, ect.

I defrag ever 6 months or so at most and I've never said "wow, what an improvement".

 

Its good to keep a clean computer but defragging once a week just isnt necessary and is actually just more wear and tear on the drive.

[pwillener]

My computer with XP is nearly 6 years old; I have never reinstalled Windows, and it works as good and fast as on the day it was delivered.

 

I keep my HD clean with CCleaner, and do a regular defrag with Diskeeper (defragmenting data files, folder files, MFT, page file).

 

The other thing I do is regularly check startup items; I only want the absolutely necessary things running in the background. Naturally I don't let any malware on my system.

 

I think it is these three things that keep my computer in a good working condition.

 

 

P.S. what I do not do (and not believe in) is registry cleaning and registry compression. If there is any impact from these functions, it is not measurable.

[tolyanki]

I agree with everything stated above, and I would like to point out (which is quite obvious) that a school's hard disk would most likely fragment a lot faster because of the constant file addition/deletion, ect.

 

I could be wrong, but that is my theory.

 

 

You said it. Some of our systems would really crawl. Kids keep adding and deleting a lot of large files, downloading study materials which leaves the drives in a pretty bad shape. As for how much performance improvement, besides file access being noticeably faster than before a defrag, we seem to have lesser problems like freezing while running multiple applications. Since its a pain to monitor and defrag each system manually, we have installed one of the commercials tools to centrally manage the task.

Thanks for all you replies guys! Guess its good to keep fragmentation at bay with just a few minutes spent regularly.

[mushu13]

On gaming machines fragmentation can cause problems with large games.

 

An example is with GTA: San Andreas.

It's main models file is called gta3.img, at installation it is about 900mb, but if you are like many people you want to mod the game and swap out cars and other items to make the game more visually pleasing. When you swap out a vehicle the chances are that it is going to be bigger than the one you replace, so if there is no room directly after the gta3.img file on the disk it becomes fragmented.

Over time and many more mods, the file gets spread across the entire disk. This causes slower loading times (depending on the computer) and sometimes models get mixed around (I once saw a semi model being used as a boat.) This causes the game to crash, or missions to become impossible to beat (an airport baggage cart can't be used as a helicopter, easily.)

 

Due to these unfortunate (but funny) happenings, I regularly defragment all my machines, just in case.

[tolyanki]

Yes, fragmentation is like a disease that cripples an otherwise healthy system. I'd like to think of it as Arthritis! Because no matter what superlative processers and other componenants one uses, the HDD being a mechanical device does tend to become the bottleneck in performance.

Mushu:Yes, thats another scenario that fragmentation seems to affect.

[rridgely]

I think you will find in a school setting that spyware, viruses, junk software, ect will be the main causes of slow down on those computers. Not to mention the fact that kids do stupid stuff when they know they aren't going to really be held accountable.

 

Defragmentation may cause some slow down but its deffinitely not the main cause or that big of an issue. I've been using computers for quite a while and I use them a lot and I have never noticed defragmentation causing massive slow down. Especially not with windows xp and ntfs file systems.

[JAGO]

Meh, I always see significant improvements in boot time.

[Andavari]

I've always been a firm believer in defragging because I've always noticed a difference but only on the disk partition that houses Windows. Other disks though like my secondary hard drive that hold all my music, videos, software installers, backups, etc., I notice zero benefits of defragging it.

 

An example is with GTA: San Andreas.

You mentioned my favourite game!

I can't wait for GTA 4, however I'll need to buy an XBOX 360 or PS3 since I'm not into PC gaming.