Optimize Drives vs Third Party Defrag

[alphanumeric]

I just let Windows do it in the background. It's been ages since I have done a defrag manually. 3 of my 4 PC's are running SSD's exclusively so they don't need to be defragged anyway. All my PC's are running 8.1 update so it knows what to do, and what not do. I don't give it much thought these days.

 

[TechnoMage]

Years ago, we defragmented the drives on Mainframe computers similar to what Jimbo45 said in one of his posts.
I do the same thing on my 1TB drive running XP. I do my weekly backup of the C: partition and then after verifying the backup image file, I do an immediate Restore of the backup. The restore process ignores everything on the partition and writes to it in perfect sequence, just like the files were originally added to the Backup Image File.
There are several programs that will do this, without errors, but I'm still using a program that I've used for years, Ghost 11.5.
It's the last DOS version of Ghost that came out of Symantec. I run it from either a boot CD or bootable Flash Drive.

As an example, here's my C: drive after a Ghost backup + a Ghost Restore.


The blue area, of course, is all my data, while the green area is the Pagefile that's re-written by Windows after the Restore and a re-boot. From my Ghost boot disk, I run a series of batch files that clean out ALL the crapola on the drive, including the Pagefile and old System Restore Points.

Files that are NOT fragmented will load quicker and with less wear and tear on the hard drive.
MS spent many man-hours and many dollars developing the Defrag program, years ago, because they knew the negative effect of a badly fragmented hard drive. Before "Defrag" came along, I would do the Backup and Restore trick at least once a month.
Now I do my C: drive backups at least once a week, and it only takes less than another 15 minutes to do the Restore.

If someone caught on, that my XP drive is still in FAT-32 format, that's correct. It actually runs faster that way and gives me full control over every file on the drive, from my DOS Boot Disk. OH, I can feel the flames rising now!!!!

As for non-MS defrag programs, , , the last one I tried left my drive in such a state, with files scattered from one end of the drive to the other, that I had to do my Backup and Restore trick to get my drive all back together again. If I'm going to do an actual defrag, I'll stick with the one from Microsoft. It works!

Cheers Mates,

 

[monkeylove]

I didn't have SSD when I used Win 7, and both OS and data were located in the same HD. Later, though, I made a partition for most of the data (lots of files, both big and small), but I still experienced a slowdown with the default setting.

For Win 8, I will use the same process (only one HD for OS and data).

 

[CountMike]

After over a year of continuous use since Win8 installed as full time OS and Win 7 3 years before that and in the mean time as secondary in dual boot.

 

[monkeylove]

In my case, it's 8 percent fragmentation after only 10 days of use. It's a new system with 8.1 installed, no system tweaks, and just one HD used for both OS and data.