Hard Disk Defragmentation

[sam fisher]

Is it really neccasary? with windows shunting stuff around ican understand it is. But my dad just defragmented MY removable hard drive with all my important data on it for no reason. Thats 100GB shunted around and then shunted around again! Was this neccasary? Will it have any useful effect? has he just greatly shortened the life of my drive for absolutely no good reason? I just thought id ask. Also that drive has no OS on it. Its purely for storage.

 

[iignotus]

On crappy filesystems like FAT, defragmentation is almost necessary. Moving around your files in a contiguous order does very little more than having to run the head over and over looking for a file. NTFS usually avoids this problem, as do almost all new Unix filesystems.

I'd say he did a good thing if your drive is FAT, and a neutral thing (leaning towards good) if it's NTFS or other.

 

[Vimacs]

Actualy ntfs is WORSE fragmenting than fat, especialy when it gets full.
there was a nice article about it some time ago in a german computer magazin (ct).
Oh and the standart windows defragmenter is crap, oo defrag is the way to go.

 

[iignotus]

NTFS is really much more resistant to fragmentation and copes with it better than FAT32, especially if the fragments are further apart on the disk.
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index3.html

 

[sam fisher]

He used standard windows. Also its NTFS. It was FAT but he formatted it without asking

 

[iignotus]

Then I would say don't fuss over it. It probably did you more good than bad. Just don't do it every day or anything, since 100gb does thrak-up very easily.

 

[sam fisher]

thrak? i have another 100gb free

 

[Squidge]

If it's your backup drive, I'd say don't defrag it so much unless you really need to speed gains given by defragging. For a drive like that, every year or so is adequate.

 

[Vimacs]

ntfs implements some techiks against fragmenting, thats right, but some of them only make it worse,
for example it leaves 100kb free after evry file, but when you start becomeing short on space it writes in that tiny 100kb clusters,
hell of a lot fragmentation.