Disk Defragmentation

[kfxd]

Do you still need to defrag a hard drive if the files are transferred over to a new drive? And do I need to defrag the new drive after the files are transferred? Also, if the old drive has been formatted does it still have to be defragged? Even if there are no files before formatting?

[mail929]

If you straight cloned the drive you should probably defrag the new drive. If you just copied the files you probably won't need to right away. The old drive doesn't need to be defragged if you aren't using it any more but if you are it could help.

[Skiiwee29]

Great thing is that newer windows automatically does the defrag, you dont need to worry or schedule it anymore.

[mariushm]

If the source drive is fragmented, during the copy process the source drive will constantly have to seek chunks of files across its surface so the overall transfer speed will decrease.

If you are cloning the source drive by using a software which ignores the file system and structure and simply reads sectors from the source disk and writes data on destination disk, then these reads are sequential and how much the source disk is fragmented makes no difference.

 

On the dest. drive, when a file is created, Windows tries to create the file in an area of the drive which has a significant amount of continuous free space, but it has no way of knowing how much the file will eventually use.  So for example, the software that copies files tells the operating system "Dude, i want to create a file and start writing data to it" and Windows will find an empty area with let's say 30 MB of continuous free space and tells the software "Ok, file created at this point on drive, you can start writing from that point".

When the software reaches that 30 MB threshold, the operating system will make a note there and then finds another big empty space and tells the software "now continue writing from that point" and that's how you get fragmented files.

 

If the dest. drive is defragmented before you start copying, then there's gonna be a huge amount of empty space on the drive so Windows will have an easier time telling the software where to write the file, reducing the amount of fragments that will be created.

 

In some situations, the software can also "hint' to the OS that it plans to write this much data to disk, like "dude, give me a place to write data, i'm hoping to write 4 GB there" in which case the OS can make an additional effort to find a continuous area of empty space as close as possible or over 4 GB so you will have less fragments.

The OS can make a soft-reservation for that area and if other applications request a place to write data to, the OS tries to avoid giving other applications place in that chunk of reserved space, but it gives up eventually if it has no choice.

[kfxd]

Thank you for your answers! Forgot to mention what I use.

I am not using any thirdparty software to do the job. Just standard Windows cutting and pasting. And the standard defrag software from Windows.

 

OS: Windows 10 Home

1) Old Drive, with files (probably fragmented, havent used it in a while)

2) New Drive, unused completely clean

 

- - -

I am transferring files from the old drive to the new one. (Cut & Paste)

- - -

 

If I understood your answers correctly,

 

Then I don't have to defrag my new drive?

Reason: After seeking for chunks that are disorganized in the old drive, the files are now transferred in the new drive and the chunks are properly set in order.

Meaning: No defrag is needed for new drive? Or both?

 

I would like a confirmation on this thanks!

[tikker]

6 hours ago, kfxd said:

Thank you for your answers! Forgot to mention what I use.

I am not using any thirdparty software to do the job. Just standard Windows cutting and pasting. And the standard defrag software from Windows.

 

OS: Windows 10 Home

1) Old Drive, with files (probably fragmented, havent used it in a while)

2) New Drive, unused completely clean

 

- - -

I am transferring files from the old drive to the new one. (Cut & Paste)

- - -

 

If I understood your answers correctly,

 

Then I don't have to defrag my new drive?

Reason: After seeking for chunks that are disorganized in the old drive, the files are now transferred in the new drive and the chunks are properly set in order.

Meaning: No defrag is needed for new drive? Or both?

 

I would like a confirmation on this thanks!

Probably not needed. You can always let Windows or another program analyze it and see if it needs defragging/how fragmented it is.

[mariushm]

8 hours ago, kfxd said:

If I understood your answers correctly,

 

Then I don't have to defrag my new drive?

Reason: After seeking for chunks that are disorganized in the old drive, the files are now transferred in the new drive and the chunks are properly set in order.

Meaning: No defrag is needed for new drive? Or both?

 

I would like a confirmation on this thanks!

The defragmentation process takes multiple fragments of a single file and arranges them in a continuous "stream" of data on the hard drive, as a single fragment... basically consolidates multiple fragments into a single fragment.

If your destination hard drive is empty, there are no files to defragment, so you are defragmenting your hard drive for nothing.

 

Unless your old hard drive is really really fragmented, there's no point into defragmenting it before you're moving files to the new drive.  Yes, it will be a bit slower to move the files to the new hard drive, but defragmenting AND then moving the files would still take way more time, so you won't save any time defragmenting your source drive.

 

After you're done moving all the files to your new hard drive, it may be worth doing a defragmentation on the destination drive. Like I explained, Windows will try to create each file you copy or move over as a single stream of data, but sometimes it's unavoidable and you end up with some files in multiple segments.

 

Especially if you have a lot of files that don't change often, like movies or music files, it may be worth defragmenting them because afterwards, those files will never move from that location on your hard drive - all newly created files will be placed around them, those files will be like an island of data that never changes.

 

[kfxd]

Ok, thank you all very much!