A good open source defragger???

[Edward78]

I have ultra defrag, but it is a bit like a dos util... Just want a good one that you can set up auto defrags...

[Theguywhobea]

Go download Defraggler.

[Windows7ge]

Is defragmenting a hard drive in a desktop even still really worth it? I may not understand because I don't write tons of data to mechanical disks on a regular basis but from my experience defrags never made much of a performance difference for me.

[MrDrWho13]

6 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Is defragmenting a hard drive in a desktop even still really worth it? I may not understand because I don't write tons of data to mechanical disks on a regular basis but from my experience defrags never made much of a performance difference for me.

Windows 10 automatically defrags your HDDs so no, not any more.

To be honest, this software is probably slowing down your PC more than it's helping since it's just another process taking up system resources.

[Windows7ge]

4 minutes ago, MrDrWho13 said:

Windows 10 automatically defrags your HDDs so no, not any more.

To be honest, this software is probably slowing down your PC more than it's helping since it's just another process taking up system resources.

To my knowledge that's a bad thing. SSD's don't like defragmentation. You can disable the defragment schedule manually under drive properties but I believe auto-defragment has been enabled by default at least as far back as Windows 7 probably earlier.

[MrDrWho13]

1 minute ago, Windows7ge said:

To my knowledge that's a bad thing. SSD's don't like defragmentation. You can disable the defragment schedule manually under drive properties but I believe auto-defragment has been enabled by default at least as far back as Windows 7 probably earlier.

Windows 10 doesn't defrag SSDs though. Only HDDs.

[BuckGup]

1 minute ago, MrDrWho13 said:

Windows 10 doesn't defrag SSDs though. Only HDDs.

That's because you can't fragment an SSD.

[factorialandha]

1 minute ago, MrDrWho13 said:

Windows 10 doesn't defrag SSDs though. Only HDDs.

actually it does, but only to a certain degree, it treats them differently than mechanical drives but it does do some defragmentation under certain circumstances.

 

2 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

That's because you can't fragment an SSD.

this is actually false, fragmentation does happen on SSDs just not to the same extent.

 

However i would never get a third party defrag tool these days, infact, ive never had a third party defrag tool

[BuckGup]

1 minute ago, factorialandha said:

actually it does, but only to a certain degree, it treats them differently than mechanical drives but it does do some defragmentation under certain circumstances.

 

this is actually false, fragmentation does happen on SSDs just not to the same extent.

 

However i would never get a third party defrag tool these days, infact, ive never had a third party defrag tool

I thought the controller onboard made it impossible 

[factorialandha]

8 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

I thought the controller onboard made it impossible 

not quite, even the on board controller cannot guarentee that there will be enough concurrent blocks available to write the file, and it will not move data around (increasing the number of writes) unless it has to, as that reduces the life span of the drive. obviously SSDs only have a finite amount of writes.

 

 

 

 

fragmentation just isnt as big of an issue with SSDs because they are so fast to return data. Also the DRAM on most SSDs tries to keep track of where data is, so that it doesnt need to randomly search the memory for it. It keeps a "map" of sorts to locate different parts of a file so it doesnt have to go searching for it.

It is possible to max out the metadata cache though, by having your SSD too fragmented (will be extremely rare for most people though) 

 

So yes.. they get fragmented .. does it matter? not really because from a performance point of view you wont notice. Is drafragmentation required. yes and no, it really depends, there is a possible.

[Windows7ge]

13 minutes ago, MrDrWho13 said:

Windows 10 doesn't defrag SSDs though. Only HDDs.

This makes me wonder why after fresh installing Windows 10 Professional on any SSD when I check under drive properties the defragment schedule is set to defrag in the middle of the night on some random day and I have to shut off the service to make sure it doesn't run.

 

On older SSD's of mine I've even failed to remember to disable the service and its ran the defrag once a week for a month or two until I realized it and disabled it manually.

[GoodBytes]

55 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

This makes me wonder why after fresh installing Windows 10 Professional on any SSD when I check under drive properties the defragment schedule is set to defrag in the middle of the night on some random day and I have to shut off the service to make sure it doesn't run.

 

On older SSD's of mine I've even failed to remember to disable the service and its ran the defrag once a week for a month or two until I realized it and disabled it manually.

Windows 10 defragmentation utility is now called "Optimize Drive", because it defrag HDD's, and in the case of SSDs it execute TRIM.

 

[Windows7ge]

12 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Windows 10 defragmentation utility is now called "Optimize Drive", because it defrag HDD's, and in the case of SSDs it execute TRIM.

 

Optimize drive handles the TRIM function? I figured that was a background task that the user couldn't so easily disable.

[GoodBytes]

6 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Optimize drive handles the TRIM function? I figured that was a background task that the user couldn't so easily disable.

Your SSD does TRIM itself as data is moved/deleted/data reduction (supported OS and SSD needed), but it doesn't do the best of jobs. To tackle that, Optimize Disk forces TRIM on the entire drive on the free memory space.

[Mira Yurizaki]

If performance is a concern, you don't really need to defrag drives anyway unless the fragmentation is severe. Like 50%+ last I checked this.

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If performance is a concern, you don't really need to defrag drives anyway unless the fragmentation is severe. Like 50%+ last I checked this.

Actually, when you look at measure of fragmentation (any tool), it always shows you the fragmentation of data, and not free space.

Depending on what you do, free space fragmentation can make your computer experience be painfully slow despite 0% fragmentated data.

Also, you might have 0% data defragmentation and 0% free space defragmentation, but still experience serious slow down because your data for Windows and every program is all scattered all over the place.

 

To fix all cases, you need an advanced tools like O&O Defrag, where it's deep defragmentation reposition data on disk, regrouping free disk space, position data by access time to maximize having files right next to each other as you open programs or start or do things in Windows, and of course defrag the data. A very lengthy process that can easily take 8h or so to do. Better disable sleep, and let your computer run it over night.

 

Alternatively, clean re-install Windows with formatting the disk, that will give you a clean disk slate. This is one of the reasons why some people feel their PC go faster after they clean reinstall the OS, as now the OS data is all right next to each other, and same for programs as they install them back one by one, and so on.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

Actually, when you look at measure of fragmentation (any tool), it always shows you the fragmentation of data, and not free space.

Depending on what you do, free space fragmentation can make your computer experience be painfully slow despite 0% fragmentated data.

Also, you might have 0% data defragmentation and 0% free space defragmentation, but still experience serious slow down because your data for Windows and every program is all scattered all over the place.

 

To fix all cases, you need an advanced tools like O&O Defrag, where it's deep defragmentation reposition data on disk, regrouping free disk space, position data by access time to maximize having files right next to each other as you open programs or start or do things in Windows, and of course defrag the data. A very lengthy process that can easily take 8h or so to do. Better disable sleep, and let your computer run it over night.

How much does NCQ mitigate this though?

[GoodBytes]

11 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

How much does NCQ mitigate this though?

I don't have figures, but the idea of NCQ is to made the HDD smarter by fetching data in a non-sequentially matter (I mean, not like a cassette tape or vinyl where you need it to play all the way until it reach the destination, instead the head moves independently from the platters rotation, can fetch group of data in any order).

So, I assume NCQ would help hugely (even though, I cannot count the number of people who have NCQ disabled, until BIOSs started to finally remove the option and have it set to enabled by default), but it would help hugely even on a perfect defrag free drive.