Re: defrag one TB drives
- From: "Twayne" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:35:31 -0400
"HeyBub" <heybub@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Twayne wrote:
"HeyBub" <heybub@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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labatyd wrote:
hear tell XP is not so good with these larger drives. Anyone with
other suggestions or is it really much of a problem. This is a USB
back up but there are some changes taking place with the files so
maybe it should be done occasionally???
De-fragging an NTSB drive will almost never result in any detectable
benefit. It's the equivalent of painting bricks - there might be
some cosmetic thrill but the activity is structurally irrelevant.
An external drive is nothing but an internal drive in a case with a
cable so it can be located outside the cable. The exact same drives
used internally are in the external drives.
What determines a need to defrag would be based on the user's
opinion, practices and type of disk usage. A disk that is only
written to and never has anything deleted from it would be unlikely
to need defragging very much.
But if it's a backup drive that needs periodic pruning such as I
have then old backups or duplicated data backups are periodically and
automatically flushed whenever the disk reaches 75% capacity. Once a
disk reaches that point then it fragments quickly, exactly like an
internal drive (since it's the same brand/model etc. as used
internally).
Your points are well-taken. With an NTFS drive, however, it doesn't
matter if the sucker is 0% fragmented or 97% fragmented. Access time
and data transfer rate are virtually not affected.
Umm, I think I know why you say that, but it's not that cut and dry. It
still takes a finite amount of time for heads on the platters to move
from one track to another and then to another, dropping the head and
just missing the data and having to wait for it to rotate around again
takes time, etc. etc.. It's seek time and access time. It's "better"
with NTFS than FAT, FAT 16 or 32, but not "virtually unaffected" any
differently than fragmentation in any other system excep in the way the
vertical platters are utilized. . If you're lucky enough that
everything you need loads into memory the first time, you won't notice
much if you notice it at all. But if you get much pf activity going on
and/or background chunks & pieces loading and unloading, deleting,
moving and creating files, you will definitely notice the fragmentation;
it can be gross enough to be measured easily without instruments.
A 97% fragmented disk is going to be quite a clunker compared to what
it will do after being defragged to the point where it's 5% or less.
You might even have to run defrag multiple times to get a full defrag
with that high a number. And if the disk is too full it might not even
be possible to defrag it, as a matter of fact.
Remember, when a disk is virgin and data is still being collected,
fragmentation won't be too bad and will be in mostly close together
sectors and tracks. But as it fills and files/folders begin to be
deleted on the disk surface, that's when the fragmentation begins in
earnest and it can even cause the heads to go to the extreme of moving
between an inner track and the outer tracks many times in order to piece
together one file that's needed.
Then also, XP itself is constantly writing to and reading the
registry which, although is done in memory, can be on disk if there
isn't enough memory. That really makes the problem get sticky.
If a PC is ideally suited to its tasks, there will be very little or no
uses of the page file anyway, which also minimizes the fragmentation it
could experience, even on approaching 80% used drives. Personally I
never see my pagefile used unless I'm doing graphics or video work, in
which case it can't be avoided on a machine that can only use 3 Gig of
RAM such as most XP machines. No, I didn't make a mistake: most
machines use around a half to a full Gig of address space for the
hardware and other unique things it may have, which only leaves a little
over 3 Gig (abt 3.4 seems "normal") Gig of address space for RAM. The
full 4 Gig of address space gets used, but it can 't all be given to XP.
XP's actual RAM limit is somewhere around 3 Gig plus a little, depending
on the machine.
HTH,
Twayne`
.
- References:
- defrag one TB drives
- From: labatyd
- Re: defrag one TB drives
- From: HeyBub
- Re: defrag one TB drives
- From: Twayne
- Re: defrag one TB drives
- From: HeyBub
- defrag one TB drives
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