fragmentation on NTFS vs FAT

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I have been running XT for years and always have everything configured to NTFS. Recently I got Defragler from PCTOOLS.

I have about 75% of the Cdrive empty.

I admit – until I got the defragger, I hadn’t checked fragmentation for years.

I may be mistaken but I don’t remember having to defrag as often before switching to XP and NTFS.

It just seems strange that with roughly 75% of the drive available, that fragmentation should be less than what I am getting on a roughly one month schedule to defrag.

This is certainly not a big deal, but I wonder if the FAT16 (or 32- don’t know terminilogy) would be better.

Tom

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I have been running XT for years and always have everything configured to NTFS. Recently I got Defragler from PCTOOLS.

First of all, NO WAY that you should “go back” to a FAT system! NTFS is as good as it gets, in my humble opinion!

I don’t use that program for defragging (I use Perfect Disk) but defragging is one of many subjects where you’ll get a widely differing opinion from computer users. I defrag my drives “about” once a month, only because it’s old habit and I feel better for having done it.

Just to give you something to compare to, my Windows 7 partition is a 100 gig with “only” about 17-18 gig used so far. It only took a few minutes to defrag the drive last Saturday.

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Recently I got Defragler from PCTOOLS.

Best place to get Defraggler is to obtain the Slim build (toolbar-free) from Piriform. It’s the final one on the Builds page.

With regard to defragmentation, I wouldn’t worry too much. Defragmentation, like registry cleaning, has become an idée fixe, an obsession, for many people – even those who know they know better! In Windows 7 Microsoft’s defragmenter doesn’t bother with chunks bigger than 64 MiB.

I would suggest you had a look at this “Engineering WIndows 7” MSDN blog entry “Disk Defragmentation – Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements“, from which I have extracted the following paragraph:

In Windows XP, any file that is split into more than one piece is considered fragmented. Not so in Windows Vista if the fragments are large enough – the defragmentation algorithm was changed (from Windows XP) to ignore pieces of a file that are larger than 64MB. As a result, defrag in XP and defrag in Vista will report different amounts of fragmentation on a volume. So, which one is correct? Well, before the question can be answered we must understand why defrag in Vista was changed. In Vista, we analyzed the impact of defragmentation and determined that the most significant performance gains from defrag are when pieces of files are combined into sufficiently large chunks such that the impact of disk-seek latency is not significant relative to the latency associated with sequentially reading the file. This means that there is a point after which combining fragmented pieces of files has no discernible benefit. In fact, there are actually negative consequences of doing so. For example, for defrag to combine fragments that are 64MB or larger requires significant amounts of disk I/O, which is against the principle of minimizing I/O that we discussed earlier (since it decreases total available disk bandwidth for user initiated I/O), and puts more pressure on the system to find large, contiguous blocks of free space. Here is a scenario where a certainly amount of fragmentation of data is just fine – doing nothing to decrease this fragmentation turns out to be the right answer!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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snip… has become an idée fixe, an obsession, for many people… snip

Love the way you use the English language, BATcher! Others must follow your writings closely, too. Assuming Windoze was deliberate, the author whose illiteracy you pointed out was quick to correct his other mistake!

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You are better off performing a regular backup than defragging. Defrag adds very little value, backup has immense value.
Defrag or No?

cheers, Paul

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You are better off performing a regular backup than defragging. Defrag adds very little value, backup has immense value.
Defrag or No?

An article which starts illiterately: “Let’s look at what files Windoze uses in it’s day to day operation.” doesn’t look promisingly authoritative to me…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Who said it was authoritative?

cheers, Paul

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