What do you use to defragment your HD
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">The windows utility gives up too fast.</div>I'm trying to prepare my computer to be sweetly made love to by BioShock, and I'd like to defrag my disk. The Windows utility gives up pretty quickly leaving much of the disk fragmented. It appears that for any file bigger than a gig it doesn't bother. Do any of you guys know of better free utilities for this? What do you use?
Comments
The fact that your de-fragmenter "gives up" might be the sign of a deeper problem with your system.
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I think the default windows defrag program will get stuck if you have any activities running in the background making any sort of even slight changes to the HD - at least that's the impression I got last time I tried to defrag.
The fact that your de-fragmenter "gives up" might be the sign of a deeper problem with your system.
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Agreed.
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I think the default windows defrag program will get stuck if you have any activities running in the background making any sort of even slight changes to the HD - at least that's the impression I got last time I tried to defrag.
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I haven't had this issue with Windows defragger since Windows 98. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/confused-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="???" border="0" alt="confused-fix.gif" />
Seems to work better than the default Windows Defragger, with a nice option to do a 2 step "Comprehensive" Defragmentation. It takes an awful amount of time to complete the 2 step process, but it does a better job overall. It does have trouble defragging huge files just like the Windows program, but I can never find a program that defrags huge files anyway. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/confused-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="???" border="0" alt="confused-fix.gif" />
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The fact that your de-fragmenter "gives up" might be the sign of a deeper problem with your system.
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Agreed.
Agreed.
I haven't had this issue with Windows defragger since Windows 98. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/confused-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="???" border="0" alt="confused-fix.gif" />
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It still exists under WinXP.
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If you are running a RAID 5 or RAID 10 system <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" /> (true story)
It still exists under WinXP.
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If you are running a RAID 5 or RAID 10 system <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" /> (true story)
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I'm running a RAID 1 system. Does that count?
I'm running a RAID 1 system. Does that count?
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Could be possible. I only had defragging problems with servers running raid 5 and 10 cause those cheapos didnt want to waste a 2003 server license ^^
You'd be best doing it when you go to bed at night... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
The length of time a defrag takes depends on how long it's been and the size of your hdd.
You'd be best doing it when you go to bed at night... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
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The length of defragging depends on both the size of your HDD and how defragmented it is. Even if you have a 1TB harddrive, as long as you defrag often it shouldn't take too long.
The best defragging utilities, such as Diskeeper, can be set to defrag in the background when needed. If you set the task to be low priority, your HDDs will be constantly defragmented and you won't even notice it happening.
Can set it up to run on a scheduled mode, or like me and use the included screensaver.. any time you're up and about, it starts defragging quietly and pauses when you come back. If you leave it on overnight, the machine is defragged and ready to go by morning (or at least most of the way there). Plus if it's installed on a laptop, it'll go into a low-power mode to save battery life until you plug it in again. Handles large volumes FAST for server use, and will use parallel concurrent physical disk defrags, if you have more than one drive.. queueing the partitions on a given drive and auto-starting each in turn to make use of the full read/write access rates possible.
Used to use Diskeeper, and tried a few others that act as front-ends for the built in Windows Defrag... once I tried this out, I've never looked back.
I have to echo Talesin's recommendation 100%. O&O defrag is exactly what every defrag tool should be. I don't use ACCESS/Modified though. I just leave it on auto-stealth with the screensaver enabled, so I never really have to run the manual degrag more than once a month, if even.
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Used to use Diskeeper, and tried a few others that act as front-ends for the built in Windows Defrag... once I tried this out, I've never looked back.
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That's pretty much my story with it too.
Been using the windows defragger ever since. And you can take care of those big files that it gives up on by moving them to another partition, defragmenting, then moving them back.
<a href="http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/" target="_blank">http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/</a>
The XP degrag tool *IS* diskkeeper under the hood, and BOTH of them are total crap.
I have to echo Talesin's recommendation 100%. O&O defrag is exactly what every defrag tool should be. I don't use ACCESS/Modified though. I just leave it on auto-stealth with the screensaver enabled, so I never really have to run the manual degrag more than once a month, if even.
That's pretty much my story with it too.
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Diskkeeper stops after a few minutes the way the windows utility does leaving half of the drive fragmented. I can keep running it, and it defrags a little more each time, but that seems silly. I'm using O&O now.
jkdefrag, it works and it's free
<a href="http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/" target="_blank">http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/</a>
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Looks good.
Thanks for the link <3!
Just as an update, this worked fantastically. It took two days to defragment it, but it did a great job.
If anything messes up your boot sequence, you just pop in your boot rescue disk, or hit F8 and boot into safe mode. Simple enough to fix from there.
Beyond that, the screensaver mode with modified/access is my friend. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" /> Stealth or space are fine, but they don't provide any read/write benefits aside from the speedup of contiguous files. Swapping to the access mode tucks all of my oldest files to the front, and speeds up future defrags a LOT.