DEFRAG YOUR HARD DRIVE Should You or Shouldn’t You? Beginners’ Kaffee Klatch Presented by Bill Wilkinson June 20, 2009
FRAGMENTATION : Refers to the condition of a disk in which files are divided into pieces scattered around the disk. It occurs naturally when you use a disk frequently, creating, deleting, and modifying files. At some point, the operating system needs to store parts of a file in noncontiguous clusters. This is entirely invisible to users, but it can slow down the speed at which data is accessed because the disk drive must search through different parts of the disk to put together a single file. Whether or not this slow down is significant or even observable by the user is an issue that appears not yet to be resolved! It might surprise you to find that the data that appears to be so neatly organized inside files and folders on your computer are actually more jumbled than a bucket full of worms. While a computer’s hard drive is very precise in remembering where it has stored your data, it does tend to store it in some strange places from time to time. Unlike a neatly organized filing cabinet, your computer breaks up large files into smaller file fragments tailored to fill the first available free spaces on your hard drive. Your Hard Drive and Your Daily Newspaper – a metaphor To better understand the concept of defragging a hard drive, imagine picking up today’s newspaper and reading a front-page article. After a few paragraphs, you are asked to turn to another page to continue reading the story. It takes some time to open the paper, turn to the proper page, and find the story to continue reading. Now, imagine that you are required to move to a different page after each paragraph of the story. It would take a lot more time to read the fragmented story than it would have if the story was printed on a single page. The same concept applies to your hard drive. It takes time for the mechanical components of your hard drive to skip all over your drive and locate all of the fragments of a single file and place them in the proper order. Over time, hard drives can become so fragmented that they appear to boot slower or seem sluggish when performing common tasks. Defragmenting your hard drive will take most of the file fragments that are scattered about your drive and organize them into complete files. Because your
Page 1 of 6 hard drive can now read the fragments as one organized file, your computer, in theory at least, should perform faster than it did in its fragmented state. When you save a file for the first time on a freshly formatted hard disk, Windows writes it in contiguous clusters. Because all the clusters that hold individual pieces of the file are physically adjacent to one another, the mechanical components of the hard disk can work very efficiently, scooping up data in one smooth operation. When you add information to an existing file, however, the file system has to allocate more clusters for storage, typically in a different physical location on the disk. As you delete files, you create gaps in the once-tidy arrangement of contiguously stored files. As you save new files, especially large ones, the file system uses all these bits of free space, scattering them over the hard disk into many noncontiguous pieces. The resulting inefficiency in storage is called fragmentation; each time you open or save a file on a badly fragmented disk, disk performance suffers, sometimes dramatically, because the disk heads have to spend extra time moving from cluster to cluster before they can begin reading or writing data. Organizing these scattered file fragments into contiguous segments on your hard drive is called defragmenting . Windows Disk Defragmenter Many Windows users have described the Windows Disk Defrag program as a “clunker”—very slow and not worth the time it takes to execute. However, if you want to do it Microsoft’s way, then make sure you run the following two Windows utilities BEFORE defragmenting your hard drive. If you don’t want to do it Microsoft’s way, then scroll down to the bottom of this document (page six) and download and install the FREE Advanced SystemCare program. Disk Cleanup. Windows accumulates many “junk” files during normal use, such as temporary ones. The Disk Cleanup utility makes it easy to delete these unnecessary files from your hard drive and free up the space for other uses. (The Disk Defragmenter does not defragment files in the Recycle Bin, so it is advisable to empty the Recycle Bin before defragmenting.) Click Start , All Programs , Accessories , System Tools , and Disk Cleanup . Choose the drive on which you want to work and then click OK. Click the items you want to delete, then click OK and Yes. Drive (Disk) scanning. Next, you should give your hard drive a basic checkup. A drive-scanning utility can give you a heads-up on some possible problems your hard drive may be facing. These utilities check for errors in file storage and
Page 2 of 6 management, which can indicate anything from a common electronic hiccup to a potential drive failure on the horizon. In WinXP and Vista, the program is called Check Disk (ChkDsk). Launch Windows Explorer by tapping the E key while depressing the Windows key. Right-click your hard drive’s icon ( Local Disk C ) in the left pane, then click Properties . Now go to the Tools tab. Under Error Checking click the Check Now button. Under check disk options , check both " Automatically fix file system errors " and " Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors ". Click Start . On the information window, click Yes . Reboot the computer. The Check Disk application will start when you reboot your computer. Warning! The Check Disk application when executed can be quite time-consuming, perhaps hours, based on the size and speed of your system. Both Windows XP and Vista come with a defragmentation tool called Disk Defragmenter. The Windows Disk Defragmenter can only defragment files that are not in use. So, although you can continue to work as your computer is defragmenting its hard drive, you will get a more complete defragmentation if you do not have programs or files open during the defragmentation process. Therefore, to get a more complete defragmentation, you should reboot your computer into Safe Mode . A sure approach to accessing Safe Mode is to depress the F8 key and keep it depressed as soon as press the start button on your computer. Use your up arrow key to move up to a Safe Mode choice and press
Page 3 of 6 defragmenting it, Windows will give you its suggestion as to whether you should defragment the drive. You also can click the View Report button to get a more detailed analysis of the fragmented files that were found on your computer. (Don’t defrag just because Microsoft tells you to do so. You would be defragging all the time if you took their advice!) When you click the Defragment button, the utility simply begins to reorganize your file fragments. Smaller fragments are shifted into free areas of the drive and slowly sorted and resaved as contiguous files. The amount of time required to complete the defragmentation process will vary based on the size of the hard drive, available free space (you must have a minimum of 15%), amount of data stored on the drive, speed of the drive, and the level of file fragmentation. A badly fragmented hard drive could take hours to defragment, but the handy graphs provided in the Disk Defragmenter interface will constantly update you on the status of the defragmentation, ensuring that your computer is working and not locked up. Once the defragmentation process is complete, you can exit the Disk Defragmenter utility. If you performed your defragmentation in Safe Mode, you will need to restart your computer to put it into Normal Mode again. For Windows Vista users , the Windows Disk Defragmenter works in a very similar way, except that all of the progress graphs have been removed and the only feedback you receive is a small box telling you that the computer is defragmenting. Vista computers may experience more fragmentation than WinXP-based systems because of all of the disk swapping that takes place. To “help” Vista users in this task, Microsoft automatically schedules a defragmentation to occur every Wednesday at 1 a.m. This will only occur if the computer is turned on, so if you think you must take advantage of the automatically scheduled defragmentation, make certain your computer is powered on overnight on Tuesdays; or you can change the scheduled defragmentation to a more convenient time via your Scheduled Tasks control panel. Depending on the amount of fragmentation on your hard drive, the performance improvement you experience after a defrag will vary. However, a recent study by Diskeeper Corporation found that a brand-new computer with a fresh installation of WinXP could boot about 27% faster after running a basic disk defragmentation. If a brand-new computer can reap the benefits of a defragmentation out of the box, some experts argue that it stands to reason that your system could benefit, as well. It must be said, however, that the Diskeeper Corporation is in the business of selling defrag software!
Page 4 of 6 On the other hand, PC World magazine, in its June 26, 2006 issue, reported that its test center set out to determine the effectiveness of the defrag utilities in popular sets of suites. Much to their surprise, their analysts found no evidence that defragmentation enhanced performance. On a desktop system from a PC World office with a heavily used, never-defragmented hard drive, the lab conducted speed tests using a range of applications before and after defragmenting the drive with each utility. In the end, the Test Center saw no significant performance improvement with any program after defragmenting. This result flies in the face of the perceived wisdom that fragmentation hinders performance, though much older PCs with slower and smaller hard drives may benefit more from defragging. The Great Debate: How Often To Defrag If defragging your computer results in a performance increase (see above for conflicting views on this subject), it would seem that frequently defragmenting your computer would keep it in top form at all times. However, a computer’s “sluggishness” is probably due to a host of issues that go far beyond fragmentation. The question of how often to defragment (defrag) is always hotly debated because the answer is relative to what you use your computer for and how often you perform other housecleaning tasks. Any computer use (even simply turning on your computer and turning it off again) creates a degree of file fragmentation). To know how often you should defragment your hard drive, you first need to know what kind of a computer user you are. Most computer users can be sorted into three categories: minimal users, moderate users, and advanced users. A minimal computer user only uses a computer for a certain fixed task, such as composing a letter or playing solitaire. Most often, a minimal user does not use email or the Internet and is on his computer less than a few hours a week. According to some experts, minimal users should defragment their hard drive very infrequently (probably not more than once a year). While additional defragmentations will not necessarily hurt the drive, the performance gained through the process does not justify the time or effort. A moderate user uses his computer on a regular basis for Internet, email, word processing, or other productivity tasks. Digital photography activity, music downloading, and frequently adding and removing programs can lead to significant file fragmentation in a short period of time. Most BKKers would easily fit into this category. Moderate computer users should defragment their hard drive not more than once every six months, according to some experts. The temporary Internet files that are stored and subsequently deleted can lead to
Page 5 of 6 significant file fragmentation. In addition, many program applications or other productivity tools tend to create significantly large temporary files that are frequently modified and then deleted once the application is closed. The holes left behind by these deleted files are known as free space fragmentation. An advanced user is defined as a computer user who uses his computer for several hours each day for intense activities. These activities can include high-end video gaming, video- or audio-editing, and advanced photo manipulation. Advanced users should defragment their hard drive(s) once every three or four months , according to some experts. The typical advanced user activities create enormous temporary files that are almost constantly modified before eventually being deleted. In addition, the massive audio or video files that are created by these users tend to be broken up and stored in every available nook and cranny on the drive. Advanced users who do not defragment their drives periodically may see dramatic reductions in performance as a result of file fragmentation. A Free Third-Party Defrag Program is Easy to Run Advanced SystemCare Free is worth your consideration. It has a built-in defragmentation program called Smart Defrag which is available by selecting this hyperlink: http://tinyurl.com/yrxd6n .
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