Defrag

[Keikan]

If I defrag how much space will it take

[wenze1]

What???

The two main reasons to defragment files on a
disk are 1) to decrease the time it takes to read the file, and 2) to
reduce wear on the drive mechanism. Regarding the first consideration,if
there is a great deal (another fuzzy term) of file fragmentation, you
will notice slower file read times, but there will be no noticeable
difference when your drive is 95% unfragmented. Regarding the second
consideration, if a file is comprised of 10 clusters, all of which are
separated on the disk, the read heads have to be physically moved at
least 10 times to read the whole file, creating wear. But defragging is
itself a very disk-intensive operation, typically moving the heads
hundreds of times,creating even more wear than the reading of a few
fragmented files would cause. (To say nothing of the way Win9x RE-FRAGS
your disk for faster loading of programs on startup).But if defragging
your disk every night helps you sleep better, I guess it's worth it.

[Keikan]

I heard defragging your hd takes up space

[100%]

if i recall windows defragmenter needs 10% free space to defrag but this is only temporary during defrag

[Keikan]

:-"

[100%]

jeeeezzzz duud you seriously need to defrag :eek:
just defrag it- if it says it cant, delete somestuff or else try norton speed disk

[sharedholder]

Posted by Seitan , somewhere

I’ve decided to make this tutorial, due some argument with my friend. The main thing is that many computer users do not understand how does computer save its information, and why does computer read write speed slows after using it for sometime. – my friend was misguided by false information. So here it is for all of you, who do not really know meaning of disk fragmentation:

Let’s take a look at the image, given below (part A.).



It show an example o flies, stored on our hard disk (of course, this is just an example, - commonly HDD stores much more information and much more files).
Files in part A are stored straight one after another, so it takes much less time for Hard disk Drive (HDD) to find needed file and read it.
Remember, that HDD I a mechanical part, and so its information seek and read time is much bigger than electronic parts (e.g. RAM).
Now let’s delete ‘B’ file from our disk (part B.).
After deletion we have a (part C.) disk – information is found and read at the same speed – hard disk head seeks info without loss on time. Just there is a blank space between files on hard disk.
But now lets watch, what happens if we store a new (part D.) file on the disk…
Look at part D.
Get it? – file is divided into two pieces and one piece is stored into small blank space, where our deleted file was, and the second piece is stored ant the end.
So now it will take some more time for hard disk head to get all information:
It will read a small (10MB) file part, and then JUMP over ‘C’ file! – this will take time for a mechanical unit…

And now imagine, that there were much more small files on your computer, which were scattered all over your disk. And you’ve deleted those files. After that you stored a large file, which was divided into small parts and written into many places of your disk. – it will take much more time for your HDD to read this information now.
This type of file divide is called ‘fragmentation’

So, what to do about it?
- simple – use defragmentation tool 
for Win2k XP users, - internal defragmentator is quite fair.
As for 9x me, or NT users – try other ones, - e.g. Norton Utilities , Diskeeper, PerfectDisk from Raxco…

[DWk]

SH always on top

[Snee]

Originally posted by Zedaxax@31 December 2003 - 12:57
if i recall windows defragmenter needs 10% free space to defrag but this is only temporary during defrag

15% of your disk space for it to be as effective as possible, works with just a couple o' percents though.

@Shared: seriously, that made my head hurt.

[chinook_apache]

i dunno when the last time i defraged my hard drives...should i be defraging them?