[rasha1997]

Many, many , many years ago defragmenting a hard-drive was a must. Or perhaps that was only during the DOS (pronounced dooooossssss) days. Lots of companies made lots of money off guys like myself, who just had to have a "well-kept" hard-drive.

Granted, Windows 7 has a built-in defragmenter, but every time I use it, it appears to do nothing substantial. And it doesn't have a pretty graphic map of the hard-drive showing all those little clusters moving around --- it sure is entertaining to watch. It made one feel secure that something positive was being done.

Enter third party defraggers. I have tried several trial-ware versions, the latest being O&O Defragger. It might show a .000014027 % defrag problem, but the pretty graphic still indicates that clusters are scattered all over the place. This is unacceptable! While my desk is cluttered, I desire that my hard-drive be compact and neat.

Question du jour? With Windows 7 should I care? If so, what is the latest state-of-the-art defragger that you Trained Professionals use?

[compnovo]

rasha1997, on 08 December 2010 - 08:33 AM, said:

Many, many , many years ago defragmenting a hard-drive was a must. Or perhaps that was only during the DOS (pronounced dooooossssss) days. Lots of companies made lots of money off guys like myself, who just had to have a "well-kept" hard-drive.

Granted, Windows 7 has a built-in defragmenter, but every time I use it, it appears to do nothing substantial. And it doesn't have a pretty graphic map of the hard-drive showing all those little clusters moving around --- it sure is entertaining to watch. It made one feel secure that something positive was being done.

Enter third party defraggers. I have tried several trial-ware versions, the latest being O&O Defragger. It might show a .000014027 % defrag problem, but the pretty graphic still indicates that clusters are scattered all over the place. This is unacceptable! While my desk is cluttered, I desire that my hard-drive be compact and neat.

Question du jour? With Windows 7 should I care? If so, what is the latest state-of-the-art defragger that you Trained Professionals use?

Hi rasha, and welcome to the forums. As a modestly trained non-professional ( ) I just let Win7 do its thing these days and my system seems to be happy with that.

[AgentF]

It is my understanding that Windows 7 handles data more efficiently than previous operating systems, so defragmenting the HDD isn't all that necessary anymore. If you want to use a 3rd-party application, I suggest you check out Defraggler. It is free and works with Windows 7. I found it significantly faster than the Disk Defragmenter built into Windows XP, but I don't know if it performs better than the one built into Windows 7.

[crazy4laptops]

Don't be too OCD about it... if you do lots of disk intensive actions like large SQL databases or editing 20-40GB HD videos or archiving 200 photos with an average filesize of 25MB, that is when you'd really have to start defragmenting your drives.

The lightest defragger I have found is JKdefrag 3.36 (not the MyDefrag 4) just scroll down a bit on the page.

It makes my windows 7 computers go from vroom to ZOOM!

[mjd420nova]

The whole idea behind defraging a hard drive is to get those programs most oftenly used on the sector and tracks that would be near the (front) beginning of the search area. This allows fewer head movements to access sequential data and thus it can reteieve files quicker. It's like a file cabinet, where getting data from multiple drawers is time consuming compared to having all your most used files in the same drawer. I've found that the more often you defrag, the faster it will do the process with fewer files having to be moved around. I defrag after every major update to Windows or MacAfee AV. It's not uncommon for drives that have not been defraged for extended periods to take up to four hours to complete. That can be pretty disruptive.

[LincolnSpector]

About a decade ago, I wrote a big utilities roundup for PC World, where--among other things--I was supposed to find the best defragger. The PC World Test Center ran tests: They found a heavily-fragmented hard drive, imaged it, defragged it with one program, then ran benchmarks. Then they restored the fragmented image and started again.

All of the defraggers came in in a statistical dead heat. Even weirder, the still-fragmented disk tied with everything else, as well.

I was so skeptical of those results that I did my own tests, concentrating on tasks that fragmentation would likely show down (such as decompressing a very large and initially very fragmented .zip file). I got the same results.

So I checked with Steve Gibson, a major authority on hard drives. He told me that the caches on modern hard drives (and remember, this is modern as of ten years ago) had completely eliminated the performance problems caused by fragmentation.

He did tell me, however, that should you ever need to restore data from a damaged HDD, fragmentation will make successful data recovery less likely.

Lincoln