Disk defrag. Truth or lie

[daaceking]

Hello,

What do you guys think of defraging?

I have been using diskeeper, many versions including 12 for many years. In terms of stability, I can't say it has prevented unstability any more than not defragging. This I really think is false.

In terms of actual performance,

If anyone has played San Andreas, they know the loading screen completes at certain points of the image transitions. With no defrag, one of my systems takes 5 intervals. On manual defrag, 2. On auto, between 2 and 3. So there is obviously some improvement.

In terms of everyday usage, I can't tell the difference between on/off. What do you guys think of defrag?

[DefenderX]

I have a SDD - No defragging for me

[daaceking]

Cool, but ssd isn't excluded according to diskeeper.

One of my systems have blazing fast raid 0. I know it's not the same but my performance doesn't suffer. On the other hand, I have a stable but dead slow hdd, which defragging did nothing.

[NaturalViolence]

Thread title: "Disk defrag. Truth or lie"
No clear question or statement. You have to make a statement before you can ask someone whether it's true or false.

Example:
"Does defragging improve performance?"

Checks OP for question or statement*
None to be found other than:

Quote:What do you guys think of defraging?

Poll options: Good, Bad, other
Which have nothing to do with a statement being true/false.

So it seems like you just want to know whether people like defragging? But you haven't given us any cons. And if there are no cons then why are you asking us if we think it's good or not?

The other possibility is that you want to know if a rumor about defragging is true. But you haven't listed any rumors.

I guess I'll just answer "good".

Quote:This I really think is false.

You think what is false? You haven't listed any possible rumors yet.

As far as I know disk defragging improves performance and the only downside is that it can take a long time.

[daaceking]

It's more to do with the communities experiences. I've given mine. I need the communities. The only question is whether or not the benefit is worth buying the software. How many people use it indicates their opinion on it's usefulness. Communities responses such as "it's unimportant" means they're happy with their hdd performance. So I want to know the communities opinion and experiences

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:The only question is whether or not the benefit is worth buying the software.

Why would you buy defrag software when all major OS have built in defragging applications?

Not to mention their are loads of great free ones to choose from.

[Starscream]

daaceking: Basically, if your file system is an absolute mess after months/years of installing/uninstalling/deleting files, it's a good idea to defrag the disk. This is not something you need to do all that often depending on how you use your PC. As far as buying software for this, there is no need to do that.

[AnyOldName3]

The main con is that if it's done on a SSD, then it won't do it any good, as SSDs don't like data being deleted from them.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:The main con is that if it's done on a SSD, then it won't do it any good, as SSDs don't like data being deleted from them.

^What he meant to say: SSDs slowly wear down over time (technically so do HDDs) and have a limited number of write cycles. The remaining lifespan on a HDDs l is dependent on a number of factors only one of which is activity level whereas the remaining lifespan of an SSD is almost entirely dependent on the level of activity (write cycles in particular). Regular defragging eats up a lot of write cycles and can slightly degrade the lifespan of a HDD and significantly degrade the lifespan of an SSD. Since SSDs have extremely low seek times/access latency they don't require defragging to keep them down and so defragging them is often seen as a pointless waste of write cycles (since it doesn't significantly improve performance on an SSD, whereas on a HDD it does.

Sorry to correct you but "don't like data being deleted from them" doesn't exactly explain the situation and also isn't technically true. Any type of write activity degrades the memory cells, not just deleting. And in this case we're talking about move operations.

[AnyOldName3]

Technically, it is the delete cycles it doesn't like, as a write to a completely blank location is more or less painless. It needs to put a large current through each NAND block to set it back to being just '0's for any delete, which causes the dreaded transistor decay. The problem is that any data block which has anything other than a 0 for every bit needs clearing before a write, so once the SSD has been used for a while, every write must be preceded by a delete. Other than that, what you wrote is good.