In news:%23iAPAYS9KHA.5464@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl,
HeyBub <heybub@gmail.com> typed:
> hello@goodbye.com wrote:
>>
>> Why would anyone NOT defrag? It's so easy to do, and its
>> something you can start doing before dinner, or before
>> going to bed. By the time you're done eating, or wake up,
>> it's finished. NOT defragging slows down your computer.
>
> Reduced efficiency is not easily detectable or significant
> on a heavily-fragmented NTFS drive.
Wrong. It isn't how fragmented the drive is, it's WHERE the fragmentation
exists. If files you seldom/never use are fragmented, no big dea. If they're
files you use a lot, you might very well begin to notice things slowing
down, notably at boot times but also in normal running.
>
>> NOT defragging makes your hard drive work harder, and
>> wears it out sooner.
>
> Nope. The head moves ONE time irrespective of the number of
> fragments (on an NTFS drive).
How do you figure that? If the fragments are on several tracks, which is the
norm, the head has to move to EACH track, get the data, move to the next
track, get that data, and so on, all in a particular order, until the data
is reconstructed for use in memory. And then, if the pagefile is involved,
there are even more head movements to get back and forth to the pagefile
which may also be on more than one track. And all of this ignores the number
of platters and latencies of getting which head ready for which platter and
whether it has to wait for the data to come round again after switching from
one track to another.
>
>> NOT defragging makes it harder to retrieve data in the
>> event a hard drive begins to fail.
>
> That IS true.
That IS inconsistant with our prior claims also. If it's just one track, why
would it matter?
>
>>
>> The more often you delete files or move them, the more
>> often you should defrag.
>
> Yes. Heavy users could possibly detect some benefit with a
> sheduled defrag every couple of years or so. Ordinary user,
> perhaps every decade.
Not necessarily. Moving a file is often a simple change in a table and
nothing at all is done to the data. The tables are simply rearranged to show
the file in a new location. You've obviously never done anything data
intensive with your machine or your experience would tell you that's
incorrect timeframes.
>
>> Browsers in particular clutter drives with cache
>> files. Always clear the cache before defragging.
But they "clutter" the drive by putting those files all in one area of the
disk under a top level folder, so there really isn't much separation between
them if the defrags previously done have left the spacings where they should
be. A proper defrag consists of a lot more than simply making file
contiguous.
You need to do some research on how a drive works and how data structures
and the tables work to maintain the drive and decide where to put data.
Fragmentation in the often used portions of your disk can definitely bring
your machine to a crawl, depending on what you do with it. Your lack of
experience and knowledge is clearly putting you at a disadvantage here. Some
legitimate research would help you respond to things like this correctly as
opposed to making guesses at what might happen. The devil's always in the
details.
HTH,
Twayne`
>> Whoever told you this is an idiot !!!
4:02 -0700, Brian V