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Windows 10 and HDD Fragmentation?


insanedown58

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I don't know if this is just for me but when I use Windows, my HDD seems to get fragmented a whole lot quicker. It could be 30% fragmented after 2-3 weeks of daily use on web browsing and sometimes editing video. When I used Windows 7 and 8.1, it would take me months before I even got past 20% fragmentation.

I noticed the fragmentation issue when my PC would suddenly feel slower despite me clearing out the temp files, caches, and similar stuff. I checked the Disk Defragmenter and Defraggler and it said that my HDD was 30% fragmented. As of now, I defragment my HDD every other week just so I can get the same performance that I get from 7 and 8.1.

Am I the only who seems to notice or has this problem?

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Don't use disk defraggs ... they are useless, you make your PC slower with those shits running in background than the actual frag..

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Hi insanedown58,

On mechanical HDD, the issue is with the free space, I think you need a third-party tool to defrag the free space just post-setup Windows installation.After that with daily, weeks usages you just need to defrag the files/folders only. The idea is to compact the system's files on the beginning of the HDD for faster latency time access, after that zone, it doesn't matter what files there. Any way, with Windows defrag Tool, you just need to do two commands just to be sure everything is OK, Open command prompt as admin and issue this command: defrag c: after that command finished , issue this command: defrag -b c: After that get finished, go to C:\Windows\Prefetch\ And delete all files/folders except for layout.ini don't delete it. Now restart your system and use it normally.

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Were you editing video before on the other OSes? .. and if so, did you have files from decoding and editing left behind?

When I had 7 Ultimate and was in the middle of a project, ( or downloading ) my HD would report high levels of fragmentation when downloading large files, having partial files on the drive especially ones that were not finished, plus the smaller the drive is it will become cramped for space when writing these files and will actually be forced to fragment these files all over the drive. Example being that the system starts to write a 6GB size file to the drive but starts to write the file in an area which will not allow for a linear laydown of that data to the disk because other small files are in the way, causing the file to be written in several parts.. hence the fragmentation..

Best solution in this scenario, for me, was to basically update all programs as best as possible. Do a spring cleaning and remove all data that you can. I would even remove ( for several reasons including data loss ) all of my personal images and documents and put them on some form of external storage. Then next step I would use a file size app like I think I used DiskSpace Fan usually.. to find large data stores or just areas I could look to, to free up space. Uninstalling programs I didn't use.. things I tried and evaluate necessity.. so on..

I would perform system wide maintenance, with all of the typical tools, then very last thing I would use DiskTrix UltimateDefrag to move and compact the MFT and Boot files.. next I would Compact or Condense Defrag the entire drive. System Volume Information areas will never move... BUT all of this would free up all other space. Incoming downloads and files would have more free space to lay down files without fragmentation in the remaining space. in most cases.. using this method would keep my fragmentation number to a maximum of 3%.. I never would usually reach any number above that until I would start to fill up the drive and of course have that issue again.

So this could be part of the issue... and System Volume Information files.. depending on their size could make this number larger than expected as well because they are usually picked up as fragmented.. I would not mess around with them however. ( this also would be relative to the installation drive or partition size.. )

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It Seems You're a Good Guy, Thank you! i got this issue, cause it happened to me too, but i don't know which Difraggler is worth to use, Between O&O Defrag Pro 19 or Still using Diskeeper 12 Pro as Usual, which on gonna Give a Good result knowing that im a Windows 10.



Thnx in advance!


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As AlexCross mentioned, don't use HDD defragmentation applications. Modern OS don't need to use them even in mechanical drives (Exception in some serious cases. And for SSD, it will be fatal). Don't know which application you used for checking the fragmentation status. If not used MS Optimization tool, check with it whether fragmented or not! Cause, third party tools may wrongly report the status.

7Ao2Jbl.png

The status shown below is after heavy usage of all the disk drives. (Download, Copy, move, Installation, Software testing, Video Encoding etc.). 30% fragmentation will take rather long time, should not the time you specified.

iVxynEP.png

And, the best option is to trash all the third party Optimizers/Cleaners/Defragmenter etc utility. Those create serious issues than do any good to the user.

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I don't know if this is just for me but when I use Windows, my HDD seems to get fragmented a whole lot quicker. It could be 30% fragmented after 2-3 weeks of daily use on web browsing and sometimes editing video. When I used Windows 7 and 8.1, it would take me months before I even got past 20% fragmentation.

I noticed the fragmentation issue when my PC would suddenly feel slower despite me clearing out the temp files, caches, and similar stuff. I checked the Disk Defragmenter and Defraggler and it said that my HDD was 30% fragmented. As of now, I defragment my HDD every other week just so I can get the same performance that I get from 7 and 8.1.

Am I the only who seems to notice or has this problem?

Where You got such a strange data? And what You it all mean - 30% fragmented? And why after 2-3 weeks?

The advertising magazine writes many weird stories, everything is no need to believe.

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As AlexCross mentioned, don't use HDD defragmentation applications. Modern OS don't need to use them even in mechanical drives (Exception in some serious cases. And for SSD, it will be fatal). Don't know which application you used for checking the fragmentation status. If not used MS Optimization tool, check once is it really fragmented or not! Cause, third party tools may wrongly report the status.

7Ao2Jbl.png

And, the best option is to trash all the Optimizers/Cleaners/Defragmenter etc utility. Those create serious issues than do any good to the user.

May be a good point.. I honestly have not tried the method I mentioned above on Windows 10 Pro... I did use it in Windows 8.1.. but have not yet on 10.. I thought I had UltimateDefrag installed but I do not... so the above post I have made I would approach with caution..Especially the boot time Defrag options if used.

My drives all four partitions.. show 0% Fragmentation and they are automatically optimized weekly...I do still remove downloaded installations and files however...and have used Disk Cleanup a few times,

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It is a fact of life that HDDs become fragmented over time especially if you download and delete a lot of files or run a lot of software programs that write but don't delete temporary files to the drive. Most of your temporary files will be found in Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Temp which is a hidden folder. Nothing in Windows cleans this folder out completely and it leads to a lot of small temporary files on your HDD and thus increased fragmentation.

But if you understand how a hard drive works mechanically and how cylinders and sectors are arranged and used it becomes obvious that at some point defragging is absolutely necessary to get the maximum performance from the drive. This is especially true as the hard drive fills up to its maximum capacity. Diskeeper and O&O Defrag, when I last used them several years ago, had the capability of moving all the system files to the 'start' of the disk (inner tracks) where they could be accessed quicker than if they resided on one of the outer rings. This is the whole point of defragging, get your files put in adjacent sectors closest to the inner tracks so the heads don't have to move all over the drive picking up pieces of files. This is particularly true for your paging file which is controlled by the system and is dynamic so as it grows and shrinks it writes data all over the disk, making it a very large fragmented drive. Commercial progarms will defrag this system file so that it resides on adjacent sectors making access to its data faster.

30% fragmentation is definitely excessive and you should defrag. Though some advocate the freeware defraggers I prefer the commercial ones mentioned previously for their ability to keep the system files together where they can run faster.

Because SSDs are electronic and not mechanical they do not need defraggers which adversely affect them since memory chips wear out when writing and reading from the same locations consistently occurs. Thus the TRIM used by the OS ensures that data is spread across the entire drive as it is written in order to equalize the usage of the chips and prolong its life. This is not a bottleneck like fragmentation on an HDD since the SSD is faster than any other component in your system.

In the end, do what you feel comfortable with concerning the fragmentation of your HDD based upon the operating principles of a HDD and not what others are telling you should or should not be done. Personally, if I still used HDDs as the primary or only drive in a system, I would be defragging. There are other tricks that were used to speed up HDDs also, such as adding a second HDD and creating a large paging file as the first file on it so the system would have a large respository that never needed defragging (paging files can be placed on any drive and made any size though by default they are dynamic and on C).

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Well over the past few months I was editing quite excessively. I worked on a 23 minute short with a lot of fancy effects at one point. What I do is I analyze with the built-in tool then defrag with Defraggler. Seeing that this isn't optimal I guess I would do everything with the built-in MS tool. I'm going to monitor my HDD for a couple of weeks and see if it persists.

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