Defragmenting my computer?

[Kevimaster]

Alright, well, I am currently at school and on the recommendation of a friend he told me to download Piriform Defraggler and run it. It turns out I have '50% Fragmentation' and it has an estimated 2 days or so to defragment the whole thing :glare:.

My question is, while I know a lot about computers and how they work and stuff, I don't know what defragmenting does, what exactly is it doing? How will it affect my harddrive space left? (I saw the amount of free space I had going down while it was defragging and I was there) Will there be any appreciable increase in performance? Just basically what is it and how does it help my computer?

EDIT: Ok, well a quick trip to google partly answered my question, so I guess its pretty much organizing your Harddrive, but how much will this increase performance, if at all? And why is my free space going down?

 

[K^^]

The 'free space' is decreasing because to reorganize the HDD the files have to be moved around and hence the 'free space' is being used as a sort of temporary storage

The increase in performance is relative...
Remember that 'computer time' is so much faster than ours. Considering your 50% fragmentation I'd say that it'll surely help your HDD, but it doesn't mean it'll make you go "OMG IT'S SO FAST LIKE IT'S READING MY MIND AAHHHHHH!!11"

Basicly, defragmenting those 50% will help to reduce the stress on your HDD even if you don't 'feel' any real diference.




-K^^

 

[Toasteddude]

It will make things load a little faster, whether or not you notice.

 

[Dmanbiker]

As I understand it, when your computer saves files, it doesn't necessarily save them to the same areas of your Hard Drive every time. As you delete files it creates large areas filled with various things between different parts of your file.

What a defrag does, is it moves the files that are "fragmented" So they're all over the place next to one another.

For example say the "|" is a File, and the "+" is a blank space. (This is what the bar on defragger with the red basically shows)

Here's your HDD before defragging:

||+++++|+++++||+|||||+++++||||

What defragging does it it makes it look like this:

||||||||||||||++++++++++++++++

That's how I understand it at least. The process is pretty complicated, I think it was invented in the 80's by some guy at microsoft. I probably didn't explain it perfect, but that's the jist of it.

As you can see it's easier to access the fragments of files if they're next to one another.

Also, usually your HDD becomes fragmented the more you delete and uninstall, and move files around.

So it becomes fragmented quite often, and you should really run a defrag every month or so (I usually don't).

Also, steam has a function where it can defrag individual games as well.

The process tends to take longer depending on the speed of your HDD, and its size respectively.

Also, K^^ is right, it probably won't visibly increase performance, but helps your computer in the long-run. But it really depends on how fragmented it is. I've see computers with as high as 90% fragmentation. It may not be too noticeable, but as said before it helps your computer more than you.

Also, how fast is your HDD? How big? Because 2 days is like what I used to see on rally old machines in the 90's, usually newer HDDs will defrag faster than that even if they have very high fragmentation.




On one more note, just as a personal experience. I was running defrags on my computer one day, when I decided the run the whole shebang, and run a disk cleanup as well, since I was running low of HardDrive space, and I hadn't gotten my new HDD yet.

I didn't realize that Disk cleanup did more than delete temporary files. It turned out my Disk Cleanup cleared a wopping 25 Gigabytes of space. So if you haven't run one of those in a while you may want to think about that too.

 

[Ratfire]

That's a good visual discription Dman.

To add on to what's been said,

Think of your hard-drive like a three story building. When you put things on your hard drive, it's like putting things in different rooms of that building. What happens though, is when you install programs or just run your computer, sometimes it can put similar things in different rooms. So in essence, when you want to run a program, your hard drive is searching and grabbing things from all three stories of the building.

Defragging puts similar items in the same place. That way when you reader arm on the hard drive goes to look for your Team Fortress Files, they're all on the first floor, in the bathroom, next to the pizza, saving you time.

In reality though the time difference it takes for your hard drive to search between fragmented and unfragmented files is generally in milliseconds which means the difference is invisible unless your computer is rediculously fragmented.


The free space on your computer going down is a temporary function of the defragmentation. Basically, what the program is doing is copying files to blank spaces on your hard drive while moving them around in order to defragment.

 

[Cut Chem!st]

I'm pretty sure the CCleaner defraggler is bugged for some and it takes a crazy long time.

Use a different defrag program.

 

[NixJedi]

GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND...

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

In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Visualization of the fragmentation and then of the defragmentation:

 

[mattM_-]

And if your looking for a neat defrag utility that doesn't soak up the resources, your command prompt holds such a nifty defrag tool.

Go to start>>and search for cmd then press enter.
Once you enter the command prompt, type defrag c:.
By typing defrag c: -? You can view available parameters to help in the process.