Is defragmenting harddrives really necessary?

[Edgar R. Zakarian]

Hi guys,

So I'm using the latest and greatest windows 10 and have a boot SSD and a small harddrive for my steam games.
I've tried defragmenting the harddrive and I see little to no gains in loading times, even though the drive showed up to 80% fragmentation before/after.

Is there some trickery that makes it unnecessary today?

[Edgar R. Zakarian]

3 minutes ago, Grand Admiral Thrawn said:

That's weird. Have you tried giving it another try?

And to be clear, you are using the built in Windows defragmentation tool, right?

Yes I am
Maybe it's because steam mostly asks for defrag by itself? 
It has occured that it asks before launching the game, and it defrags the game only.

 

It was about a week ago, and now it looks like this:

 

So I don't see much point in defragmenting again.

[Kenpachi1985]

It depends on the size of the harddrive itself, the speed/performance of it and the amount of data stored on it. You have a "small" harddrive", so even if its forced to read data from various spots on itself it shouldn't hit performance a lot even when its widely fragmented.

But lets say you have a decent or even a big one (=<1TB) and have plenty of data on it - since its a mechanical device, the more data it has to collect and the more space it has to search/acces, the longer it will take due to physically limited speeds. Which means - the more fragmented it is and the more data it has to use for the task the more time it needs - and defragmentation becomes important.

[Edgar R. Zakarian]

1 minute ago, Kenpachi1985 said:

It depends on the size of the harddrive itself, the speed/performance of it and the amount of data stored on it. You have a "small" harddrive", so even if its forced to read data from various spots on itself it shouldn't hit performance a lot even when its widely fragmented.

But lets say you have a decent or even a big one (=<1TB) and have plenty of data on it - since its a mechanical device, the more data it has to collect and the more space it has to search/acces, the longer it will take due to physically limited speeds. Which means - the more defragmented it is and the more data it has to use for the task the more time it needs.

That makes sense, thank you!
Do you know how a playstation 4 works? - Does it need defragmenting too?

[Kenpachi1985]

Just now, Edgar R. Zakarian said:

That makes sense, thank you!
Do you know how a playstation 4 works? - Does it need defragmenting too?

I have no idea since consoles are of no interest to me.

[mariushm]

I suggest using a better tool like O&O defrag for example : https://www.oo-software.com/en/download/current/oodefragpro

Defraggler is also a free option

 

The percentage doesn't tell you an accurate picture of how much your drive is fragmented.... for example, 7% fragmented only tells you that 7% of the files on your drive are fragmented, but doesn't tell you if a file is fragmented in only 2 segments within the same area of the drive, or the file is in 1000 chunks spread all over the area of the drive.

 

Defragmenting can help speed up loading game levels and may reduce the amount of "hiccups" or delayed texture and music loads in games that stream content from disk, for example in a game like GTA V when you move fast with a plane on the map you may see buildings pop or trees pop up with some bit of delay if your hard drive is too fragmented.

 

It doesn't matter how often you defragment a mechanical drive, when you add content to it there's a chance that stuff will be fragmented.

For example, let's say your hard drive looks like this:

[ ### game 1 ###|  free space 20 GB | ### game 2 ### | free space free space 50 GB ]

 

Now let's say you want to install a 60 GB game, which doesn't fit in the 20 GB area or the 50 GB area.

Each time the installer / downloader creates a file, Windows looks for a big empty area of free space (hoping the file will fit in the area, because it doesn't know how big the file will eventually be)

So let's say game copies a 1 GB file - Windows will put it in the 20GB free area and you're left with 19 GB.

Game copies a 10 GB file ... you have 9 GB left in that 20 GB area 

Game now copies a big 10 GB file ... Windows doesn't know it will be 10 GB so it starts placing the contents in that 9 GB of free space... it puts 9 GB and then puts the rest of 1 GB in that 50 GB space the end. 

Now your 10 GB file is fragmented in 2 chunks, one 9 GB and one 1 GB.

Now if you load a game or the game needs content from both parts of the file, the hard drive will constantly move its heads between the first 20gb part and the end 50 gb part, so the content will load slower.

 

Defragmenting will basically move the whole 10GB file to the 50 gb free area in one continuous block.

 

 

 

 

[Edgar R. Zakarian]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

I suggest using a better tool like O&O defrag for example : https://www.oo-software.com/en/download/current/oodefragpro

Defraggler is also a free option

 

The percentage doesn't tell you an accurate picture of how much your drive is fragmented.... for example, 7% fragmented only tells you that 7% of the files on your drive are fragmented, but doesn't tell you if a file is fragmented in only 2 segments within the same area of the drive, or the file is in 1000 chunks spread all over the area of the drive.

 

Defragmenting can help speed up loading game levels and may reduce the amount of "hiccups" or delayed texture and music loads in games that stream content from disk, for example in a game like GTA V when you move fast with a plane on the map you may see buildings pop or trees pop up with some bit of delay if your hard drive is too fragmented.

 

It doesn't matter how often you defragment a mechanical drive, when you add content to it there's a chance that stuff will be fragmented.

For example, let's say your hard drive looks like this:

[ ### game 1 ###|  free space 20 GB | ### game 2 ### | free space free space 50 GB ]

 

Now let's say you want to install a 60 GB game, which doesn't fit in the 20 GB area or the 50 GB area.

Each time the installer / downloader creates a file, Windows looks for a big empty area of free space (hoping the file will fit in the area, because it doesn't know how big the file will eventually be)

So let's say game copies a 1 GB file - Windows will put it in the 20GB free area and you're left with 19 GB.

Game copies a 10 GB file ... you have 9 GB left in that 20 GB area 

Game now copies a big 10 GB file ... Windows doesn't know it will be 10 GB so it starts placing the contents in that 9 GB of free space... it puts 9 GB and then puts the rest of 1 GB in that 50 GB space the end. 

Now your 10 GB file is fragmented in 2 chunks, one 9 GB and one 1 GB.

Now if you load a game or the game needs content from both parts of the file, the hard drive will constantly move its heads between the first 20gb part and the end 50 gb part, so the content will load slower.

 

Defragmenting will basically move the whole 10GB file to the 50 gb free area in one continuous block.

 

 

 

 

Thank you for the thorough explanation!