De-fricking-fragging

[Spike]

One of my drives gave up the ghost yesterday - a 100Gb affair that's been in two different machines and has lasted a nice long time. Annoying, since it's my games drive, so I have a LOT of reinstalling to do!

This death made me wonder how you folks look after your drives: I have tried Norton, O&O and several other defraggers but never really seen any solidly reliable, good app that REALLY defrags (instead of just shuffling a few files and claiming ignorance of the remaining mess) except Buzzsaw/Dirms. It'd also be nice to have one that doesn't chew up ALL my resources, so I can at least use the PC in the 24 hours it normally takes to run on one of the drives (and there are three to get through!).

Any advice/opinions appreciated, along these lines if possible:

1. Scans and defrags on what kind of schedule?
2. What defragger do you use?
3. Does it REALLY make a difference?

Incidentally, I had credit at the place I order hardware (ordered a DVD burner from two different places a while ago, so cancelled one), so I can replace the drive with a 250Gb, for no effective cost.

[The Meal]

Spike, there's probably some good advice for you on this page.

Best of luck,
~Neal

[Spike]

Spike, there's probably some good advice for you on this page.

[Kraken]

1. Scans and defrags on what kind of schedule?
2. What defragger do you use?
3. Does it REALLY make a difference?

1. I defrag when Norton tells me I'm 10% fragmented. On my C: partition that's about once a week. SETI@Home seems to cause most of my fragmentation. On my other drives, every few months is plenty.

2. I use Norton Systemworks. I suspect that it overreports fragmentation.

3. Who knows? It used to make a big difference in the olden days.

[Freezer-TPF-]

I just use the Windows defragger. If you want to spend money, I hear Diskeeper is good. I'm not a big fan of Norton stuff except for their antivirus.

With a huge HD, partitioning it into a few smaller drives will make defragging a little more bearable since you won't have to do the whole 250G at once.

[Jeff V]

Fragmentation doesn't cause drives to fail, it just slows them down a bit. I defrag mine whenever they appear to be struggling overly long to load things. I also keep the swapfile on its own partition.

My hard drives (I always have 2) are on a 2 year rotation. Every year, I get a new primary drive, and demote the old primary drive to the secondary drive. The old secondary drive gets handed down to less important computers in the family. Except with an unfortunate incident involving a pair of matched Deathstar drives about 3 years ago, this strategy has helped stave off unfortunate disasters.

[Rip]

I like diskkeeper and it is actually affordable these days.

[Spike]

I like diskkeeper

Why?

[ChrisGwinn]

Defragging doesn't make any difference for most people. You can absolutely hose up your drive to the point where you have to defrag, but i've only done that while developing and testing large data conversion projects.

[Rip]

I like diskkeeper

Why?

Because it defragments system areas that the free ship with windows version doesn't, and can be set to defragment at routine times, or with the screensaver etc. If you administer a sizeable network it allows you to control the defragmentation of all the PCs from one system.

[Spike]

I like diskkeeper

Why?

Because...

Thanks for the details, Rip.

[gorham09]

The original poster mentioned "Buzzsaw/Dirms." Are these good defraggers to use? (Question coming from a newbie to the world of defragmenting who until now has relied on Norton)

[Spike]

They're command-line defraggers. Buzzsaw works in the background, while Dirms seems to defrag pretty well.