Defraggler is taking way longer than it should be

[dynctmu]

I started the defragmentation like about 16+ hours ago, left Defraggler overnight to do it's thing and woke up to a 0% progress. I know that it's usual for defrag to take a long time but it's weird for a PC which:

-Is in safe mode,

-Has no other programs running, including any tasks in the background (double checked in Task Manager to ensure, nothing is using resources other than Defraggler and maybe MS Defender with your usual system processes like explorer, svchost etc.),

-Had a full cleaning both by CCleaner and Windows Disk Cleanup prior to starting Defraggler,

-Has Defraggler's task set to real-time priority (highest possible) in Task Manager > Processes tab.

I also enabled the "Stop VSS when defragmentating NTFS volume" option in Defraggler's settings and it's a Quick Defrag, not even a full one. There isn't even any ETA, the remaining time is still being calculated since I ran defrag.

I cleaned up my drive as much as I could but it's not going any higher than 15% free disk space, it's a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda HDD which I had for 13 years. I didn't have any signs of disk failure since I built this PC (I ran a chkdsk command with sfc /scannow and a couple of DISM commands like a day ago, not a single error was found to fix), but there is about 287,9 gigs of fragmented files/about 33% fragmentation. I'm adding the screenshots of Defraggler's current state, maybe that can be useful.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Edited June 21 by dynctmu

[nukecad]

The first thing that I notice is that you only have 14% free space on that C drive.

That is not enough and you need to move things off it (or get a bigger capacity drive for C).

With a HDD as the system drive (C:) it's recommended that you keep at least 20% free or things may slow down.

[hazelnut]

@dynctmu

How many restore points do you have ?

[dynctmu]

15 minutes ago, hazelnut said:

@dynctmu

How many restore points do you have ?

Just one, I also set the limit of max usage for System Restore to 7% (about 65 gigs).

1 hour ago, nukecad said:

The first thing that I notice is that you only have 14% free space on that C drive.

That is not enough and you need to move things off it (or get a bigger capacity drive for C).

With a HDD as the system drive (C:) it's recommended that you keep at least 20% free or things may slow down.

Just went ahead and moved about 100 GBs to an external drive, guess it's my lucky day because I didn't know that people in my household had this much of useless files.

 

The drive now has about 25% of free space, above the 20% limit as you mentioned, but I'm currently not observing any changes on Defraggler's speed. It still is unbearably slow. Still no ETA either.

[dynctmu]

Just an update: Even after cleaning up my PC and restarting the defragmentation, about 5+ hours have passed and Defraggler still shows 0% progress. Remaining time is still being calculated too. 

I had an idea to try and run boot time defrag for once, in hopes of putting some large system files (such as pagefile.sys) aside to make defragging faster. That did NOT have an effect on Defraggler.

The issue persists.

Edited Saturday at 00:44 by dynctmu

[hazelnut]

Does Windows Defragmenter work on your machine?

[dynctmu]

8 hours ago, hazelnut said:

Does Windows Defragmenter work on your machine?

Yes, but I don't think it is good enough, that's why I'm using Defraggler. About 2 years ago I used both with Windows Defragmenter being first, and after WinDefrag completely finished it's job, Defraggler still showed that there's still a lot of fragmented data in my PC.

@nukecad Any advices for my previous posts?

Edited Saturday at 13:06 by dynctmu

[nukecad]

The drive does look pretty badly fragmented in your screenshots, I guess it's  a while since you last did it.

Once you have got it sorted then it will go quicker in future

One of the consequences of having todays larger TB sized drives is that things like defragging or file recovery take a long time.

As for Defragler seeming to be doing more than Windows then you would have seen the same if you did it the other way round.

It's just because different defrag apps have different limits and rules. So using any one after any other will appear to do something 'extra' but they are just shuffling the same files about in different ways - you could run 2 different defraggers one after the other all day without them ever argreeing.

Best advice is to pick one and only use that one.

These days I also use the built in Windows Optimise/Defrag on the few spinners that I still use for backups.

PS. There is another way to defrag files, without using any defragger - copy All your docs images videos music etc. onto another drive, delete them from the original to give you lots of free space, (OK at this point if it's a C: drive you can defrag the system files still on there), copy the files back. If you watch the copying you will see that it's moving them one at once ie. it's writing them back unfragmented.

Thats basically what a defragger does on a single drive, moves the fragmented files to some freespace then moves them back when enough space been emptied to put them back in one piece - but because you are using a second drive to do that it's the equivalent of having lots of free space on a single drive.

[Andavari]

Personally what I'd do instead of waiting and eternity with Defraggler is to change strategy and instead:
1. Analyze with Defraggler, then click the File List tab, and only defrag the fragmented files in the list instead of trying to do a Quick Defrag or something more thorough.

2. Use Windows Optimize Drives ("Defrag") to do the Consolidation of moving files closer together. Note that it won't bother with files over 64MB in size (although they state that I've seen it reduce the amount of fragments of gigabyte sized files), which is why Defraggler is used first to defrag only fragmented files.

[dynctmu]

7 hours ago, Andavari said:

Personally what I'd do instead of waiting and eternity with Defraggler is to change strategy and instead:
1. Analyze with Defraggler, then click the File List tab, and only defrag the fragmented files in the list instead of trying to do a Quick Defrag or something more thorough.

2. Use Windows Optimize Drives ("Defrag") to do the Consolidation of moving files closer together. Note that it won't bother with files over 64MB in size (although they state that I've seen it reduce the amount of fragments of gigabyte sized files), which is why Defraggler is used first to defrag only fragmented files.

Thanks for the answer, that's actually really close to what I did!

I found out that Windows' defrag tool did not include files more than 64 MB on it's task, just like you said, so I started to use Defraggler for all files above 64 MB using the "File List" tab you mentioned, it really finished in like an hour or so. I also, no matter how big or small it was, started to defrag the files with the most fragments (there were files with about 2,500+ fragments) to a certain point and at the end, the 34% fragmentation has dropped to 6% using this strategy. For that 6% of fragmentation, I used Windows Disk Optimizer and as there were no files above 64 MB with any fragments, it worked for the rest of the files, so I managed to completely finish the defragment process. 0% fragmentation currently.

Use Defraggler for files above 64 MB, use Windows Disk Optimizer for any other file and it might just save you lots of time (I'm talking about days).

[nukecad]

Apologies, I had though that you were already doing a 'File Defrag', but looking at your screenshot again it was a 'quick defrag'.

The difference is that a file defrag just does what it says and defrags the files, it doesn't attemp to 'consolidate' all the file in a nice contiguous pattern of all 'blue' blocks together.
That's why it's quicker to just File Defrag, it isn't trying to move everything on the whole drive.

PS. You may have noticed that the Windows Otpimize/Defrag no longer shows you a drive map with those blocks moving about and changing colour.
That's partly because some people would spend hours of their lives trying to get all the blocks blue and all at the start.
Which isn't needed and never was - and if you do manage to do it then it won't be like that for long.
(Some people still do spend hours trying to do that when they can see the blocks, and we still occasionally get asked the best way to do that with Defragler).

[Andavari]

4 hours ago, nukecad said:

That's partly because some people would spend hours of their lives trying to get all the blocks blue and all at the start.

Which isn't needed and never was - and if you do manage to do it then it won't be like that for long.

I think that was a relic caused from the Win95/98 era sitting there for an hour or longer because sometimes the defrag would be interrupted by something rather consistently like the OS doing something. I think allot of us were trying to get everything unrealistically scrunched together as tight as possible which wasn't actually always possible to achieve. It was more of a thing back then, and the defrag maps in defrag software sort of encouraged it because they didn't bother explaining things.

Nowadays some modern hard disk drives will place files in zones for better performance and possibly to help reduce future fragmentation, etc.

Getting files as tightly compacted as possible near the front of the drive (even if it causes fragmention) is useful as a safety precaution when partitioning/splitting a drive into two or more partitions, Samsung has even briefly mentioned before in their Magician SSD software that a traditional defrag (not a TRIM) might need to take place before partitioning an SSD.

[hazelnut]

9 hours ago, Andavari said:

I think that was a relic caused from the Win95/98 era sitting there for an hour or longer because sometimes the defrag would be interrupted by something rather consistently like the OS doing something.  

If I remember right it was the screen saver turning on that interrupted it.

[Andavari]

Screensaver was a well known culprit. There were other background things too (haven't a clue what they were).