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General discussion

Do you still need to defrag your hard drive these days?

Apr 6, 2018 5:04PM PDT

Hi, hopefully some of your experts can answer this: to defrag or not to defrag your drive? I recently just bought a new Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows 10 with an Intel i5 CPU, 8MB of RAM and 1TB hard drive. I come from an old and probably outdated computing maintenance knowledge and when things are running sluggish on the PC, the first thing I do is defrag the hard drive and run a scan for viruses; at least that was what I learned from others over the years. My question is simple: Is defragging your hard drive something that is still valid today when you feel your system is running sluggish? Or is that a trick of the trade that has long been abandoned? If not defrag, what do you recommend when your system is running sluggishly? Please enlighten this old fart with the new age tricks. Thank you.

--Submitted by Peter H.

Discussion is locked

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This is what I see...
Apr 13, 2018 4:07PM PDT

This prompted me to go into the Win 10 'Optimise Drives' option. Strangely, in view of many replies, it says my SSD 'C' drive is OK, 'last run 22 days ago' suggesting Win10 DOES defrag SSDs (this might explain why it is my third or 4th SSD in this machine). My spinning HD D Drive is shown as 0% fragmented and always has been when I've occasionally checked, ever since Win 10 was installed, several years ago. This suggest that the OS is managing it efficiently (or the 0% is wrong).

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Nobody has mentioned Diskeeper
Apr 13, 2018 6:24PM PDT

I've run Diskeeper since at least ten years ago and I find it very good at keeping a HDD cleaned up and well organized. A few years ago I cloned my HDD to a SSD but kept Diskeeper running, not for defragging but more for optimizing. After all, if the original HDD was defragged and optimized, I'm comfortable with letting it keep working, especially since I clone the SSD to an external HDD weekly so things go on the backup drive cleanly and well arranged. One of the best things about Diskeeper is it works during idle time so you aren't fighting it while you're working.

One of the previous posters mentioned he has experience from the 70's. My own experience is almost as long, from the mid-80's. That's a lot of time to see what works and what doesn't.

Don, y'all

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Diskeeper User
Apr 14, 2018 6:31PM PDT

I also use Diskeeper regularly and have been doing so since it was first available.

Interestingly, my computers always run very well, with minimal problems if any and my hard drives last a VERY long time.

Many people ask what my "secret" is, and I always say "I don't over use my discs and I don't abuse them."

They don't believe me because my systems run 24/7, so I them point out that if your HDDs are kept defragmented, they will operate at peak efficiency and will have much less read/write cycles, so they get much less use, resulting in much longer life.

Those that listen to me end up having HDDs that last much longer; those that don't wonder why their disks don't last long...

I guess they would rather think it's a mystery of the digital gods.....

I don't really like SSD's so I don't use them, but if I did I would definitely NOT defrag them as they do have limited read write capabilities.

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Defrag? The short answer is yes, with qualifications
Apr 13, 2018 7:53PM PDT

There are still good reasons to defragment a hard drive, but there is less need to do so.

First, if your system has a solid state drive (SSD), you probably do not have to defrag it ever.

Second, if the hard drive is more than 75% full, Windows most often will split up files into multiple fragments, especially when downloading. So defrag, but do not be obsessive about it. I know a guy who defrags his system every day, even after I have told him 100 times not to do it. Enough already!

Third, if you use Outlook or Thunderbird any have really big email archives (PST, etc), and they get defragmented (which they will), defragging individual email archive files with a program like Defraggler will speed up email handling. A few years ago, a guy got so many emails every day that his PST was always badly fragmented. I solved the problem with a command line file that ran Sysinternals' CONTIG every night when he shut the system down.

Otherwise, don't get obsessive. If your system starts to get sluggish, run Defraggler to see how fragmented the hard drive is. While at it, click the Health tab to verify that the SMART data shows a still healthy drive, ***VERY*** important.

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Some things to check
Apr 13, 2018 8:48PM PDT

From what I have read it is not good practice to defrag ssd drives as some have stated here.
Win10 comes with a built in defrag program and is set to defrag on a schedule that could interfere with other basic operations of the device, so for me I have turned it off and use either super easy live defrag ( a paid program that is now free) or auslogics disk defrag also free but will install added programs and change your default home page if not unchecked on install and updates.
Super easy can be configured to run on a schedule and what drives to add to the defrag, can be run automaticly or manually, will show a weekly report of what it has done.
Auslogics disk defrag can be set to run with windows, set default defrag options, or run manually with some basic defrag options.
Granted I still use disc based hard drives and not ssd's but when ever I check the defrag status using win10 built in defrag it always returns a zero to low fragmentation level.
One reason I do not use the win10 built in defrag is it is very slow, no options to configure, runs multiple passes that can take hours just on one drive.
If a new system is running slow, I would first check what programs are running, updating, or using system resources,task manager, core temp, cpuid hardware monitor are just a few.
Win10 will run updates, as well as the microsoft store, defender security center and third party antivirus products, dell software etc.
How many cores are in the i5, is that 8 gig of ram in the system, the 1 tb drive an ssd or disk drive and is the ram ddr3 or ddr4 ?

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DO NOT DEFRAG!
Apr 13, 2018 9:41PM PDT

SSDs do NOT have an infinite number of writes. Meaning, use it and lose it. Furthermore, it would serve no benefit to defrag the everyday SSD. Google it!

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Hi, my name is Gerd and I am a defrag defaulter.
Apr 14, 2018 3:34AM PDT

On my early PCs I used to defrag regularly, just like the next guy. Today, I practically never do, and I'll explain just now why I don't need to.

A bit of historical background: When I started working with computers disk access was still very much in the hands of the programmer - addressing the exact cylinder/head/record location where you wanted to write your data - as well as the record size. There was no such thing as a standard sector or cluster size that was applicable to all software on that file system. For all I know, this is still the way disks are typically accessed under z/OS, one of the mainframe operating systems that originated in those days.

But back to PCs: Remembering that early disk drives would have capacities of, say, 5 Megabytes - no, not Gigabytes or Terabytes (!) - it was fairly normal then to format disks to physical sectors of 512 bytes and organize those in clusters of 1, 2 or 4 kilobytes. As disk cpacity grew it became necessary to combine more sectors into clusters that would then be quite a bit larger, so that cluster numbers would still fit in the 32-bit data fields allocated for them in the standard data structures. Eventually all that broke apart and today we have disks with 4096 byte physical sectors and much larger clusters as well as cluster numbers now being stored in 64-bit fields in extended data structures - let me spare you the details of all the intermediate steps. When you have to make a choice nowadays between an MBR or a GUID partition table - that is what we are talking about here and that became necessary because we now have to be prepared to run with disks of many Terabytes capacity, which means lots more and lots bigger clusters than in the old days.

Originally, disks or disk partitions would be formatted with one of the FAT file systems, the "biggest" one being FAT32, which can handle partitions up to 8 Terabytes (at a stretch) and files up to 4 Gigabytes (minus 1 byte.) Windows will not format anything bigger than 32 Gigabytes in FAT32, although it will understand the larger FAT32 partitions. Windows nowadays clearly prefers the more advanced NTFS file sytem, which can work with partitions of 256 Terabytes and files of 16 Terabytes (approximately.)

This is what we are working with today. Clusters can be up to 64 Kilobytes large. Files up to 4096 bytes are stored inside their directory entry in the master file table. Such files as well as all files up to the cluser size can by definition not be fragmented - you need at least two clusters to form two fragments.

Now, on the final lap to defragmentation considerations, we need to understand which files this leaves us with that could be fragmented, how many fragments per file are likely, and how fragmentation of such files will affect your processing. The main thought here is that - compared to the early PC days (37 years ago) a LOT fewer files will be fragmented. And most of those that are big enough to be "seriously" fragmented would fall into mainly two categories - multimedia files and big databases, including things like email repositories and the like. These have the property that they may grow over time and each added cluster would then be likely to be discontiguous from the main body of the file. Such files would tend to get rather fragmented over time. Multimedia files, on the contrary, would tend to be moved around as a complete entity and would be placed by the operating system into an area that has a sufficient number of contiguous clusters, so we wouldn't expect much fragmentation there. (The ability to allocate enough clusters for the whole file up front did not exist in the early versions of DOS and Windows.)

One other pertinent thought: Whenever you copy a fragmented file to a disk with sufficient space the copy would be (mostly) unfragmented. So, for instance, if you copy all your files on a disk (can't do that with your system partition so easily, unfortunately) to a new, maybe larger disk the migration automatically defragments the lot.

Plus: Faster disks with bigger built-in cache also reduce the effect of fragmentation simply by giving quicker responses and in some cases by reading ahead for data that is expected to be needed next. Also, as cylinders (yes, they still do exist on spinning disks) have gotten so much bigger now, the somewhat slower cylinder-to-cylinder seeks are getting rarer as well.

In summary: On today's computers there is much less of a need for defragmentation. And most of us probably could happily live with a fragmented email repository. And maybe that email repository would look really good on your SSD, where fragmentation doesn't matter at all. All in all I have come to the conclusion that defragmentation is overrated and not worth it.

(And - for those of us who worry about wearing out the drive mechanics, which I suppose could happen - have a look at a graphical representation of the defragging process. Some of the older, really smart defragging tools show you how they move fragmented data out to free contiguous clusters and then write the data back. This is a real treat to watch, especially on a reather full drive. But it also gives you a very clear idea of how much wear and tear that will add to your drive mechanics ...)

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Defrag your Hard Drive
Apr 14, 2018 4:50AM PDT

Yes,,, Due to the graphics and audio intensive usage, it causes fragmentation and badly. Bit's and pieces of your file will be scattered everywhere over the hard drive. This is should be very evident if you spend any amount of time in social media that uses graphics and audio intensively. You will notice a very definite slow down. The Microsoft Utilities can be used though, will lie to you about the need. I would recommend you get a good third party utilities such a Piriforms CCleaner, and Defraggler.

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Which one
Apr 14, 2018 11:32PM PDT

This is one of the answers
HDD do still have fragmentations issues, but the NTFS filesystem does tend to have less than FAT-32, and defragging will do nothing to an SSD.
So how do you find out which one you have??

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Re: which one
Apr 15, 2018 1:04AM PDT

Unclear what you want to find out:
1. How many disks you have
2. Which of these are SSD or HDD?
3. What partitions each disk has?
4. How each partition is formatted?

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How to tell ...
Apr 15, 2018 1:07AM PDT

When you look at the display of drives (in "My Computer" or "This PC") you right click on the drive you are interested in and select "properties" - the resulting pop-up window will tell you all kind of things, among them the file system.

As for SSD or HDD, I have to guess (of course, an SSD could be formatted in any file system, just like a HDD or a USB flash stick.) Chances are you know where your SSD is, anyway. Otherwise, I hope someone else who already has an SSD can help out here Wink

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Defrag doubles the speed of my os SSD drive.
Apr 17, 2018 10:39AM PDT

I don't care if it wears it out a little faster, I will get more work done. There are lots of little os files that get modified and end of severely fragmented. I have seen no change in lifetime from defraging SSDs.

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Not to be snarky
Apr 17, 2018 12:33PM PDT

Not to be snarky, but you would be the only person in the world who sees even a noticeable improvement from defragging an SSD. Have you actually measured the difference? Or, is it just a subjective feeling?

Also, you won't notice a "...change in lifetime" until the drive goes down. That day will come sooner if you defrag it. If you can afford buying a new drive sooner, then go for it.

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maybe he "thinks" it's an SSD...
Apr 17, 2018 3:41PM PDT
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Here's a setting I found to really help.
Apr 17, 2018 12:56PM PDT
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:-(
Oct 28, 2018 7:16AM PDT

Who would have thought that a multi screen could send someone to the point of
Total despair. I just spent the best part of a week retyping passwords as the multi
Screen can catch 1 pass word on one screen and 5 minutes later catch another on another screen which is identical to the first and then throw another in just for laughs. I went through 2 re-installs 8 Microsoft staff and a permanent twitch to work it out leaving my GeForce in tatters and after an only 6 month old computer 20% fragmented and now watching for 2 hours and only it’s 3rd pass. But after a letter to Microsoft and one here if I can save one person the torment of redoing more passwords than I’ve done in 6 days than I have in 6 years then it was worth it.

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External HDDs and SSD guide I live bye.
Nov 29, 2018 11:05PM PST

First and foremost the simple fact is people who use Windows 10 Home are screwing themselves over if you have a SSD. Unlike with Enterprise or other higher level W10 versions, the automatic settings since the last update is autodefragging SSD for absolutely no benefit. In Enterprise it simply takes on the settings if you have a third party defragger like Perfect Disk or Diskeeper. Which I recommend if you have a bunch of external usb2-3 HDD drives like I do. I would disable your auto disk defrag in Home Win10 if you have a SSD.

The only case examples where defragging a SSD could help is large video files on a partition on the SSD that are over 8gb depending on your page file size and RAM of the computer. Anything smaller will never cause a fragmentation file, or decrease for the life of the SSD. If you installed windows on a partition along with a recovery partion and have the rest of the SSD on another partition all you have to do is simply set your C and Recovery as "Exclude Drive" in Diskeeper or "Exclude from Optimization" in Perfect Disk.

On the case of HDD after NFTS and GPT boot sectors, disk fragmenting is only an issue on heavily used large file size and when drives are too full to dump large files to RAM. It also can happen in large file transfers that you had to abort or the computer restarted abruptly before RAM could be dumped. Till all your drives are SSD you should atleast monitor your drives File Fragmentation and Free Space Fragmentation status. If a HDD is over 30% drive performance is affected and actually causes more wear and tear on a HDD the higher the fragmentation. All you have to do is defrag once every 6 months and spot check.

The only drive you should ever consider and boot time defrag on is your C drive if it is not SSD. As stated earlier there is absolutely no reason to defrag a C partion on your SSD if you have another partition on the drive. All video storage should be on the other drive. This will prevent read and write cycles. I keep my c partion pristine only images etc. If you must setup an automation schedule, simply exclude your C drive partion on the SSD.

I have used Perfect Disk for two decades now.

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Turns out, we're wrong. SSDs can need a "sorta-defrag"
Nov 29, 2018 11:21PM PST

I learned something tonight. I searched on Win 10 home defragging SSDs, and ended up finding this discussion by a Microsoft employee.

The short version is: First, it is true that defragging provides a trivial increase in speed. But, apparently there are some internal tables and other metadata that can become fragmented. And, apparently, there are limits to the maximum fragmentation that Windows can handle.

The Windows defrag utility will do an optimization pass, to intelligently clean up its tables. I don't believe it does a full "defrag" as it would on an HDD. So, it should not be hammering an SSD. But, it will perform a little necessary maintenance.

So, from a user perspective, it can look like Windows is defragging an SSD. But, it's really not.

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Defrag Needed
Aug 24, 2019 7:56PM PDT

It depends on how much the system is used. If large amounts of files, etc., are moved around and modified, software installed and uninstalled regularly, etc., then defrag and even optimize might be needed.

The built-in defrag for Win 8.1 and 10 will do both based on a default schedule which you can change, and for SSDs will trim.