How often do you defrag?

How often do you defrag?

  • Once a day (or more)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • After I delete/uninstall stuff.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    22

aimeeandbeatles

watermelon
Joined
Apr 5, 2007
Messages
20,081
Poll coming.
 
I forgot to add "never" to the poll. :blush:

Do Linux defrag by themselves, or do they save files for best usage of disk, or what?
 
Depending on the filesystem used, there are a variety of methods involved.

In general, they save files for best usage. It is possible to seriously fragment a Linux system, if you set out to deliberately do just that. But in normal use, it doesn't happen. I have never seen my system get more than ~5% fragmented, even after running constantly (not even a reboot)for more than 2 months. I usually install Linux, and then never, ever, worry about fragmentation.


On my wife's Vista box, between all the crap that our grandkids download, and how long it's been since I did any maintenance on it, it is running like a dog. I need to sit down and do some cleanup (including defrag) this weekend.... :sigh:
 
I looked it up, and it seems to say since it doesn't crowd files together, that if you edit a file, you don't have to move pieces of the file elsewhere. But it can get fragged if you have more than 80% full.

Source
 
Never.

On my wife's Vista box, between all the crap that our grandkids download, and how long it's been since I did any maintenance on it, it is running like a dog. I need to sit down and do some cleanup (including defrag) this weekend.... :sigh:

Vista defrags automatically when idle, unless you've disabled it through the task scheduler.
 
Rarely these days. I just do it for the thrills, anyway.
 
On Linux never. On Windows daily (using JkDefrag).
 
Given the size of HDD these days I reformat probably every two-three years.
 
Maybe once a year. I have enough free space so it doesn't get to bother me more often than that.
 
Never.



Vista defrags automatically when idle, unless you've disabled it through the task scheduler.

Great, one more useless service to disable...

I never saw any real advantage from defragging NTFS file systems.
 
Some services you want to disable just because they are annoying as hell though :p
 
On Windows daily (using JkDefrag).

That's a good way to send your hard drive(s) to an early grave. If you want to be fanatical, you can defrag maybe 2-3 times a month, but even that's fairly pointless unless you are doing a crapton of file movement to cause fragmentation. Most people really don't need to do it more than 2-3 times per year.

I really only defrag when I either need to tweak the position of apps on the disk, or else I've been doing a lot of installing/uninstalling. Got about 4 games I'm planning to uninstall this weekend, will probably defrag after that.
 
Whenever I think of it really. Which isn't all that often. I don't think I've defragged my program/data drives since I set them up in December, and I'm not sure I've defragged my XP drive either. My Windows 7 drive auto-defrags itself.

But now that I check, my data drive is extremely fragmented:



52% fragmentation, 88% file fragmentation. That's in part because about 47% of the drive (9 of 19 GB) is two files, though. The funny thing is, I haven't noticed any performance degradation, and this is the slowest part of my hard drive to begin with.

Speedo does have a good point, though - while the efficiency of a nonfragmented drive usually cancels out the cost of fragmentation, if you do it too often, or too too high a degree, the defragging will put more wear on the drive than being fragmented. That's why Windows 7 no longer completely defrags a drive - it will leave a small portion fragged if it isn't worth it to defragment it.

*thinks UAC in reaction to Cutlass's post*

*leaves data drive at 88% fragmentation since there's only 5% free and it still seems decently fast*
 
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