Optimize Drives vs Third Party Defrag

[LovingWindows]

Do you use the built-in Windows Optimize Drivers (Disk Defrag) or do you use a third party product?

If third party product, which product and why?

 

[mikiep]

I saw on a forum somewhere, where the poster seemed quite knowledgeable about win8. He said to someone, whom was having difficulties with an extreme slow boot.. to never ever use a 3rd party defragger on win 8. And the reasons why, which made sense. He has a short list of major reasoning. Which I don't want to pull from my memory because its gotta be fighting words to those that use other defraggers.

 

[bagavan]

Automatic maintenance which also optimizes my drives

 

[arachnaut]

I use PerfectDisk by Raxco.

I like the performance improvements I saw when I tested it.

 

[brummyfan]

I use system's Optimize service.

 

[jimbo45]

Do you use the built-in Windows Optimize Drivers (Disk Defrag) or do you use a third party product?

If third party product, which product and why?

Hi there
in over 30 years of using various flavours of Windows (and Linux too) I have NEVER needed to defrag a drive -- and on the very rare occasions I've experimented with this stuff it didn't seem to make an IOTA of difference.

Slow disk performance is usually due to poor HDD's. SATA 7200 RPM's are OK and of course these days with SSD's then poor disk performance can be a thing of the past.

W8 is optimized anyway so any 3rd party defrag is really uneeded in any case.

The only time a defrag might be necessary is when running a Virtual machine due to the way in which the "Virtual Disks" can grow - but this is usually handled within the virtual machine environment such as VMware where their own utilities are used to "defrag the virtual disks".

If you want to re-organize your disk drives a good solution is to take an image backup using a program such as acronis, re-foirmat the drive and then restore the image.

Unless you are doing an exact cluster by cluster restore the restored image will have all the "wasted chains" etc all removed and the data on the disk optimized.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[DavidY]

in over 30 years of using various flavours of Windows (and Linux too) I have NEVER needed to defrag a drive -- and on the very rare occasions I've experimented with this stuff it didn't seem to make an IOTA of difference.

I'm rubbish at deleting stuff so ran for a long time with a very full HDD, in Windows XP, which didn't auto-defrag. As the anti-virus software was updating its database, it would keep having to scavenge around for space on the disk and end up with a database file in about 10,000 fragments (which of course it kept having to refer to, nearly every time I did anything on the computer). In that circumstance, defragging did make a big and noticeable difference. Another example is defragmenting the pagefile and hibernate file (which you could do in XP using Sysinternals) when they also got fragmented due to lack of space, and again this made a big difference.

But I agree that it's probably quite rare that it makes much difference.

 

[jimbo45]

in over 30 years of using various flavours of Windows (and Linux too) I have NEVER needed to defrag a drive -- and on the very rare occasions I've experimented with this stuff it didn't seem to make an IOTA of difference.

I'm rubbish at deleting stuff so ran for a long time with a very full HDD, in Windows XP, which didn't auto-defrag. As the anti-virus software was updating its database, it would keep having to scavenge around for space on the disk and end up with a database file in about 10,000 fragments (which of course it kept having to refer to, nearly every time I did anything on the computer). In that circumstance, defragging did make a big and noticeable difference. Another example is defragmenting the pagefile and hibernate file (which you could do in XP using Sysinternals) when they also got fragmented due to lack of space, and again this made a big difference.

But I agree that it's probably quite rare that it makes much difference.

Hi there
XP is a different ballgame -- but even there a Backup and restore would fix it -- and I think unless you were really short of RAM the paging device or data set wasn't heavily used in most cases. Note also paging was only used after the OS was booted -- so it wasn't "Persistent" between boots. It opens fresh after each boot.

W8 has a lot better "Garbage collection" routines built in to the OS.

However if any system is running with 95% full disks you are bound to get some sort of degradation.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[azasadny]

I've never used a third-party defrag tool because I don't believe they offer enough (or any) advantage over the built-in defrag to justify the cost...

 

[DooRules]

To my knowledge w8 has nothing to do with GC on any ssd. It is run from the FW level on the ssd.

Maybe you are thinking of trim and it's implementation.

 

[brummyfan]

I like the way Optimize identifies SSD and stops defragsvc.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
W8 file system reclaims deleted space much more efficiently than previous OS'es -- but rather than run a full bloodied defrag on a disk that's had zillions of updates and file deletes you are much better off backing it up, re-formatting it and restoring it again.

3rd party backup / restore (unless operating in full disk clone mode -- cluster by cluster - 99.9% of time unnecessary) reads complete files sequentially and saves in compressed mode to the backup disk. When restoring the files are read sequentially and on a newly formatted disk they are allocated as efficiently as possible (space wise that is) which is a lot better than the hours spent in a defrag which is only a partial solution at best since it's almost impossible to move and re-allocate loads and loads of files optimally on a single disk.

One use for clone mode is used when MOVING or COPYING some types of databases where the index structure contains references to specific relative or actual physical disk addresses -- I'm not going in to the geometry of disk drives --you can google for that -- but just backing up and restoring normal data or OS'es shouldn't need "Clone mode".

If you don't believe how difficult or complex a defrag process is just take a piece of paper and draw an image of a disk with say 30 files in the directory with space allocated all over the place with very few areas of empty space.

Now try and devise an algorithm for reading these -- combining space where possible, chopping out unused space from other allocated files etc etc. It's not trivial and on say a 1 TB fairly full drive with loads of small files and deleted chains it can take HOURS. often moving and re-allocating the same pieces of data MANY times during the process.

A backup / restore will complete very quickly indeed --and also an advantage is you've got your backup.



In any case USER data doesn't change very much -- if you are optimising a disk drive it's only even worth considering on the OS drive which if its an SSD won't need this action anyway

Cheers
jimbo

 

[adamf]

It a bit of an old chestnut this question. Fragmentation is an issue on any file system. I had a salesman from EMC come to prove to me that if he backed up my (fairly large) server onto his disks it would be quicker. Guess what, it was.

You can achieve the same by backing up and restoring your system on the disk you already have.

If you have only a couple of drives on your system let windows optimise it. These guys are all PHD in Math and know more than us certainly. If your system is larger and you have several hundred disk or SAN then the optimisation will run under Linux on the IO subsystem anyway.

If you have a Mac, Linux or windows home PC and you have some reason to think it is slow because of fragmentation then just refresh it by copying your files to an external drive and then restoring them. You will get a better result than paying for some software and it is free.

 

[adamf]

A backup / restore will complete very quickly indeed --and also an advantage is you've got your backup.
Cheers
jimbo

I missed you post. Exactly correct.

 

[Hopachi]

I have NEVER needed to defrag a drive

Yes. I never need to defrag the drive myself.

Automatic maintenance which also optimizes my drives

It happens automatically when computer is idle.

 

[monkeylove]

I've been using Win 8 for only a few days, so I'll stick with the default setting for now.

From what I experienced, the need for third-party software has a lot to do with the amount of data copied, moved, and deleted in the HD. If it's not much, then one can probably make do with the default setting.

I experienced this with a PC running on Win 7 with lots of data moved around. With the default setting, I noticed in time a noticeable slowdown. When I used a third-party program, though, it speeded up.

 

[CountMike]

Ever since I started using Win8, including RC before that, I turned off auto defrag and no third party defragers and guess what, fragmentation hangs around 0 (zero). Was really close to that during Win7 days and believe me my HDDs and SSD get quite a workout. Programs downloaded and data, brought in, uninstalled all the time. There's about 1,5 TB of data on disks with maybe 50 GB going in and out. If that amount of stuff going thru W7 and 8 I don't know how much more I can write and erase to make it fragment any more.

 

[Clintlgm]

I used Norton Utilities for several years then moved to Diskeeper. However with Windows 7 I experimented with the built in Defrag and found that it worked just as well as the Diskeeper that cost money. So I just don't use any 3rd party optimizing programs at all. Win7 and Win 8 seem to handle my optimization just fine.

 

[DavidY]

Ever since I started using Win8, including RC before that, I turned off auto defrag and no third party defragers and guess what, fragmentation hangs around 0 (zero). Was really close to that during Win7 days and believe me my HDDs and SSD get quite a workout. Programs downloaded and data, brought in, uninstalled all the time. There's about 1,5 TB of data on disks with maybe 50 GB going in and out. If that amount of stuff going thru W7 and 8 I don't know how much more I can write and erase to make it fragment any more.

But does that mean your OS is on an SSD? (Where fragmentation isn't an issue).

On my old Win XP setup, where it didn't auto-defrag, the (spinning) OS drive needed regular defragmenting and performance was definitely suffering, so now in Win8, I leave the built-in defragmenter switched on.

I've found that on drives where there isn't an OS , fragmentation is much less of an issue.

 

[CountMike]

Ever since I started using Win8, including RC before that, I turned off auto defrag and no third party defragers and guess what, fragmentation hangs around 0 (zero). Was really close to that during Win7 days and believe me my HDDs and SSD get quite a workout. Programs downloaded and data, brought in, uninstalled all the time. There's about 1,5 TB of data on disks with maybe 50 GB going in and out. If that amount of stuff going thru W7 and 8 I don't know how much more I can write and erase to make it fragment any more.

But does that mean your OS is on an SSD? (Where fragmentation isn't an issue).

On my old Win XP setup, where it didn't auto-defrag, the (spinning) OS drive needed regular defragmenting and performance was definitely suffering, so now in Win8, I leave the built-in defragmenter switched on.

I've found that on drives where there isn't an OS , fragmentation is much less of an issue.

There's 3 HDDs where most of the stuff and all data is stored, SSD is for windows and some programs only. There's no valid reason for system, boot drive to fragment, it happens when there's a lot of files going in and out. Even if there was an HDD instead of SSD as boot drive there would be no more fragmentation. As you know, files are not really erased when deleted, they stay where they were and OS writes data to empty spaces until it runs out of them, only then real erasing and writing goes on. If a file will not fit in empty space, parts of it that does not fit gets written to next empty space and that's called fragmentation. In SSD it does not matter if file is split in multiple spaces because every cell that contains it is equally available to OS. The only slowdown can occur during writing is if non empty cells have to be erased at the same time as data has to be written to it. That's where GC (Garbage Control) in SSD's firmware coes into play and at spare time when SSD is not used, it erases (write zeros, turn transistors off) in the cells that are marked by Trim for total erasure. That because of it's speed happens in milliseconds and does not affect SSD's speed at all.