never needs defragging

J

JamesBart

New Member
is this strange or not because my Hdd never needs to be deragged and ive worked sold with it for 6 months between 10-15 hours a day and it says that its fine. how could this be? is it a good sign or something to worry about?
 
Not so sure

tlarkin said:
modern file systems do not fragment that easily, and thus do not really need to be defragmented.
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My drive gets very formatted after a while. I have a Windows XP Pro OS just for clarification. I would not worry if Windows says you don't need to defrag. I defrag about once a month anyway.

JAN :D
 
smart file systems these days like ext3, reiser, hfs+, ufs, and NTFS keep meta data about files on the hard disk, and thus, the meta data keeps track of the data file and where it is stored on the hard disk. So, everytime you modify the file it modifies that exact file, where in older file systems, such as FAT16 (32) created a new file instead because it could not always keep track of where the file was located across whatever sectors on the disk it actually was.

Now, of course this is not to say that XP machines running NTFS do not get fragmented. As long as you have a decent amount of HD space free (I would say decent amount is 10% of full capacity) disk fragmentation should not be an issue. I never have to defrag my HD.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
 
I have heard windows has some built-in defragment/optimizing program that it runs automatically when it detects your system's idle. I know I've caught my drive going crazy then quicky back to idle at the tap of the mouse...
 
The_Other_One said:
I have heard windows has some built-in defragment/optimizing program that it runs automatically when it detects your system's idle. I know I've caught my drive going crazy then quicky back to idle at the tap of the mouse...
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Possibly with file caching, clearing logs, etc, but not with fragmentation. Fragmentation was a larger problem in older file systems that did not keep meta data. They could not keep track of where the file was located on the drive phsyically, so if you modified any data it just created a new file, and then marked that the old file could be overwritten if necessary.


However, natively if your system is idle it is idle unless you have something scheduled to run when idle, or some third party app running optimizations.
 
6071842 said:
is this strange or not because my Hdd never needs to be deragged and ive worked sold with it for 6 months between 10-15 hours a day and it says that its fine. how could this be? is it a good sign or something to worry about?
Click to expand...
If I understood you correctly, it's probably just because you don't do a lot of moving and copying pasting on your hard drive eventhough you work on it for hours upon hours. It's really up to you and if you don't feel like it needs to be defragged, leave it as it is until you think you should.
 
computerhakk said:
If I understood you correctly, it's probably just because you don't do a lot of moving and copying pasting on your hard drive eventhough you work on it for hours upon hours. It's really up to you and if you don't feel like it needs to be defragged, leave it as it is until you think you should.
Click to expand...

Even if you do, do a lot of copying/pasting that doesn't actually change the physical location on the disk. Instead the meta data is modified.

Did anyone read the links I posted?
 
Most fragmentation occurs when you are constantly installing and uninstalling software, such as testing beta-releases and trials. If you rarely do this, fragmentation is minimal.
 
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