Microsoft Defrag Utility Question

michael diemer · May 1, 2013

I have a Glyph external hard drive, 500GB (465 usable). It has 185GB used on it. It has never been defragged. It's about 2 years old. It has primarily music-related stuff on it, such as sound libraries and sequencer software. when I run the defrag analyzer, it always says it has 0% fragmentation. In fact, the same happens when I run it on the internal drive. That one does get defragged on a regular basis. what's going on here? Is there really no fragmentation on the external drive? It has numerous files on it (several dozen), so I'm surprised it is not showing any defragmentation.

michael diemer

Deleted member 217926 · May 1, 2013

It may be due to the drive being external but that is strange. Personally I have always used a third part defrag program. You could try that. I have used the excellent Auslogics disk defrag for years. It's free and has both normal defrag and optimize modes.

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/

There if also Defraggler for another free choice.

http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

The only way I know of for a disk to have 0% fragmentation is if no data has been written to it since the last defrag.

bigpinkdragon286 · May 1, 2013

Defragmenting is not as necessary in the last few years as it used to be. As drive speed has increased, the noticeable effects of fragmentation have been mostly mitigated, whether they are present or not.

As for your external drive having zero fragmentation, that would be subject to how you've used the drive. Fragmentation only occurs after files have been deleted from a drive, before the end of the entirety of the data set, and new files written to the previously used, but now freed space, without sufficient contiguous space. In other words, if you haven't done a lot of deleting and further writing to the disk, you likely have little fragmentation, if any.

It's also possible the drive is being automatically defragmented as part of a scheduled task in Windows. If you open up the Windows Defragmenter tool, it should tell you when the drive was last defragmented, or indicate something similar to "Never run."

popatim · May 1, 2013

BigPinkDragon is right on the money! I'm guessing you've never deleted anything therefor there's 0 fragmentation.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

You're right, I haven't deleted anything. But I'm about to. I have a 16 GB file that was a windows Easy Transfer, that I don't need anymore. So, I should defrag after deleting that file? O should I not even bother to delete it, as I have more than half the disc space remaining? My concern is that my new sound library may load slowly, and I want to do everything I can to maximize load time. The library is about 15GB.

bigpinkdragon286 :

Deleted member 217926 · May 2, 2013

Defragmentation is still necessary unless you have an SSD, then you should avoid it altogether. Mechanical hard drives are still very slow compared to solid state drives and their seek time is very much affected by where the data is stored on the disk.

Windows comes with a very basic defrag tool. Aftermarket tools like the ones I linked to above actually move the most accessed data to the outer edges of the drive making access faster.

I don't defrag storage drives often but it is still a good idea to do it every few months or when adding or deleting large amounts of data. I use the Auslogics program and the "Defrag and Optimize" setting.

As drive speed has increased, the noticeable effects of fragmentation have been mostly mitigated, whether they are present or not.

As an overall percent mechanical drives have been stuck at the same performance level for years. Increasing platter density is the only thing making drives faster. Spindle speeds have been the same for well over 10 years. Defragmenting can still be very useful and as long as mechanical drives exist I imagine defrag programs will be necessary as well.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

Very interesting discussion, folks. I'll check out the defrag tools and see where I stand, after deleting the file I mentioned. thanks to all who responded.

Defragmentation is still necessary unless you have an SSD, then you should avoid it altogether. Mechanical hard drives are still very slow compared to solid state drives and their seek time is very much affected by where the data is stored on the disk.

Windows comes with a very basic defrag tool. Aftermarket tools like the ones I linked to above actually move the most accessed data to the outer edges of the drive making access faster.

I don't defrag storage drives often but it is still a good idea to do it every few months or when adding or deleting large amounts of data. I use the Auslogics program and the "Defrag and Optimize" setting.

As drive speed has increased, the noticeable effects of fragmentation have been mostly mitigated, whether they are present or not.

As an overall percent mechanical drives have been stuck at the same performance level for years. Increasing platter density is the only thing making drives faster. Spindle speeds have been the same for well over 10 years. Defragmenting can still be very useful and as long as mechanical drives exist I imagine defrag programs will be necessary as well.

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

As it's been stated, never defragment an SSD. However, something that has not been stated is that you should not defragment any hard drive frequently. Consumer hard drives are not designed to withstand a 100% duty cycle, but during defragmentation that is what you are subjecting the drive to.

I'll say it again, the need for defragmenting went out with the need to interleave your hard drive sectors. Drive mechanics may have stagnated somewhat, but technology doesn't stand still. Drives now have large buffers compared to years past, and the operating systems are smart enough to read ahead when accessing file systems.

If somebody can post real numbers as to the impact of file fragmentation on a reasonably new hard disk, I am more than open to it. I would wager it would fall close enough to the margin of error for any measurement test that it's entirely imperceptible by human standards.

However, as Michael has mentioned, he is concerned about loading a large sound library. I think there may be other, more beneficial avenues to examine than chasing subjective defragmentation results.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

Hmm, now what? I ran the defrag utility, Auslogic, and it found that my drive was only about 2% fragmented. now I'm worried that I may have damaged my external hard drive. hopefully the fact that it's a Glyph will help! I was about to defrag the internal drive, which is a WD Caviar blue, but now I'm going to hold off, pending further review, as they say in the NFL (how long is it until pre-season?).

bigpinkdragon286 :

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

My apologies, was not intending to upset you. I was trying to stress that defragmenting is not going to solve much, but can come with overhead of it's own. I have known people to defragment their drives daily, and even recall a screen saver that would defragment hard drives pretty much whenever a computer sat idle.

Let's try and look at it another way...

Think of your hard drive like a car, that is warranted for 100,000 miles. Defragmenting is like putting extra mileage on your car, for very little return. Say, like driving 1000 extra miles to get your oil changed. The more often you do it, the more you are stressing your device.

There are different methods to defragmenting, however, and if you are not trying to be cute about the defragmentation, you minimize the stress to the drive. Microsoft does what's needed to be done, and little else. Gains from trying to shoehorn your files to certain locations on a drive, while sometimes achievable, take a lot of time, and should be done based on the access patterns to your files. As you change your access patterns, your drive would need to be optimized yet again. The gains here are likely to be lost from the speed at which most external devices can transfer data to and from your computer.

Eventually, everything wears out, and I'm not a fan of helping that along, as in the end, that just costs money. Microsoft has picked a good interval for defragmenting, which is weekly. Any more than that is just unnecessary, and I would say almost wasteful, of your time, of the equipment's usable life, electricity, etc., for almost no appreciable gains. If you're worried about the time it takes to load your sound library, the first thing I would do is get a faster storage solution to load your libraries from.

Rest assured, you haven't hurt your drives by defragmenting them, you've simply used them, as intended, to read and write data. Just remember that every mile adds up.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

Whew, that was close! Re: faster storage, I assume you mean SSD's. I can't use one with my current computer, as has been established previously on this forum (mobo is too old). so, until I build me a new rig, which will happen next year, I wanted a new sound library to improve my compositions. I chose Vienna Strings Special Edition 1, which I can easily run on my current computer. I was just trying to optimize it so my experience will be as good as it can be. I don't know if the defrag I just did will help or not, but we'll see. Meanwhile, do you think I should go ahead and defrag the internal drive? I was first going to analyze it. If it's really low, like the external, which was only 2% fragmented, it probably wouldn't be necessary, right?

bigpinkdragon286 :

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

The percentage of fragmentation is actually kind of meaningless without explanation of what exactly is fragmented. If the files you are working with are not fragmented, you will gain nothing. Frankly, I'm not sure whom told you that you couldn't use an SSD with your computer, but that is frankly incorrect. SSD's are generally attached internally to a computer via the SATA interface, and yes, if you had only an older, parallel interface you could not attach to that, there are external SSD drives which you could use. You would need to ask yourself if you would see a benefit from the SSD or if it would be lost at the bottleneck of your external interface however.

Typically you will find external drives connected by USB, either 2.0 or 3.0, FireWire (iEEE1394) 400 or 800, Thunderbolt, or eSATA.

If your motherboard is old enough to be unable to natively support an SSD, it likely will have an older external serial interface of these types, at which point, I would wager your best bet is to save up for your new rig, rather than try and fit a band aid solution on it now. However, if you have better external interfaces available, you would likely see an immediate improvement from say, going from USB 2 to 3, FireWire, or especially eSATA.

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

As for defragmenting your internal hard drive, depending on what operating system you are running, it may already be done on a weekly basis.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

I am in fact using an eSata connection to the external drive. So you're saying I could use an external SSD? Still, my mobo is maxed out at 8GB ram, and I need 16-32. Also, this computer has Windows7 Home Premium, which limits the ram to 16GB, I believe. So I need a new mobo, windows7 Pro, as well as SSD's. As you said, it makes more sense to do a new build.
Incidentally, the internal drive turned out not to be fragmented, so I guess the Windows automatic defrag is running by default.

bigpinkdragon286 :

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

Yes, as you are running Windows 7, it only defragments what needs to be defragmented, and does this by default every Wednesday. So, essentially, only newly fragmented files are even worried about, and only about once a week, so that should be transparent to you.

Likely, your external drive was not defragmented because Windows probably chooses by default not to defragment external devices. I'm not sure, but would suspect such behavior. eSATA is actually about the best you can hope for with an external hard drive, and in fact, you won't be bottlenecking on a standard mechanical disk with that interface. An SSD would be a nice upgrade, however, and since you are using eSATA, you could easily buy something like an eSATA dock and drop a regular SSD straight in, and voila.

Depending how you are being provided the eSATA connection, via a card or a direct motherboard connection, you may actually have internal SATA, which would mean, yes you can run an SSD internally as well.

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

Essentially, something like this would allow you to simply drop an SSD into the slot and start running with it, utilizing your existing e-SATA port, so to speak, and when you move to a new system, you would just take this with you, or you could have the SSD internalized at the time you move on to the new build. But effectively, you could gain the SSD now, and keep it as you move on.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1DS0CD0638

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

Noticed you had listed your computer, and if this is what you're running:

http://support.gateway.com/s/PC/R/1015002R/1015002Rnv.shtml

According to Gateway's specifications for the system there are multiple internal SATA ports, which would allow you to have an SSD installed internally, provided you haven't used up all of the ports. That would be your fastest solution. No question about defragmentation at that point, and it could be transferred to your new computer in the future.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

I have an expansion card for the eSata, and yes it has one internal port as well.

bigpinkdragon286 :

Yes, as you are running Windows 7, it only defragments what needs to be defragmented, and does this by default every Wednesday. So, essentially, only newly fragmented files are even worried about, and only about once a week, so that should be transparent to you.

Likely, your external drive was not defragmented because Windows probably chooses by default not to defragment external devices. I'm not sure, but would suspect such behavior. eSATA is actually about the best you can hope for with an external hard drive, and in fact, you won't be bottlenecking on a standard mechanical disk with that interface. An SSD would be a nice upgrade, however, and since you are using eSATA, you could easily buy something like an eSATA dock and drop a regular SSD straight in, and voila.

Depending how you are being provided the eSATA connection, via a card or a direct motherboard connection, you may actually have internal SATA, which would mean, yes you can run an SSD internally as well.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

Yes, that's the critter, GT5656. I had posted a question last month about the SSD question, and got some responses that led me to believe I could not use SSD with this computer. For example, Johnny Luck said:

"More Bad news.

"Your motherboard is an older AMD 939/758 board that was released in 2007 prior to the advent of consumer oriented solid state drives. Although the board is SATA 2 3Gb/s capable, the capability does not include ssd's. Support was limited to hard disk drives and optical drives. There are no motherboard system BIOS updates, chipset updates, or drivers that would help."

What do you think about his response? Can I use an SSD, as you suggest, or is Johnny right?

(The post was: SSD: Sata II card vs. III, from 4/6/13)

bigpinkdragon286 :

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

His response makes little sense to me. Essentially, whether you have an SSD or a physical spinning disk is for the most part, transparent to the computer. Essentially, both an SSD and physical hard disk will have a SATA connector on them, making them at least backwards compatible to any other SATA connector, such as what appears to be on your motherboard, be it version 1, 2, or 3, and the computer simply sends requests for data down the SATA cable. As long as both ends know what they're doing, it doesn't matter what's on either end. The awareness for SSD is built into Windows 7, which really just does a few minor tweaks, such as turning off defragmentation for the SSD and I believe some caching modifications, plus Windows 7 added a trim command for keeping performance on SSDs at better levels automatically. I know there's a few more things Windows 7 does, but they escape me at the moment. All in all, if your SATA ports can run like SATA ports, you can plug an SSD into them. Preferably you will want to enable something known as AHCI, but even without it, the device will function. Being a branded computer, you're likely already running your SATA ports in AHCI mode.

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

In case you are wondering about the big deal concerning defragmenting an SSD, to try and make a long story short without going into too much gory detail, each storage location on an SSD has a finite number of write cycles it can perform, after which the memory cell becomes something akin to read only. Defragmenting, by nature, is write heavy, and as such, dramatically shortens the lifespan of an SSD. For normal usage, and providing no freak occurrences, SSDs will reliably last for years of reliable service.

Before you worry about fragmentation, one trait an SSD does not share with a physically spinning mechanism is the seek time. In essence, you can access any storage location on the SSD in the same amount of time as any other, thereby rendering fragmentation a non-issue. So, the lack of defragmenting is actually a non-issue. Furthermore, because SSDs employ very neat wear leveling algorithms to ensure no one storage location is ever written too more excessively than another, the computer really doesn't know where at on the SSD anything is ever being written to anyway, so a defragmentation would be rather misleading anyway.

Deleted member 217926 · May 2, 2013

michael diemer :

JohnnyLucky is our resident SSD expert and I would believe him if he told you your board will not support an SSD. Just looking at your computer info I see you have an GeForce 6150SE chipset. There is no AHCI support with the Nvidia chipset and without more research I suspect that is the reason for your board not being compatible.

Actually I found this.

http://communities.intel.com/thread/23650

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

AHCI is not required for compatibility.

michael diemer · May 2, 2013

Wow, all this is amazing. Bottom line, I think I will just put the new music software on my glyph external. If it works well enough, fine. That will keep me occupied until next year, when I waltz my way into retirement and build a new computer as my present to myself. I'll be looking for plenty of advice about then from all you wonderful people. Many thanks for all the "solid" help (couldn't resist that).
michael diemer

michael diemer :

JohnnyLucky is our resident SSD expert and I would believe him if he told you your board will not support an SSD. Just looking at your computer info I see you have an GeForce 6150SE chipset. There is no AHCI support with the Nvidia chipset and without more research I suspect that is the reason for your board not being compatible.

Actually I found this.

http://communities.intel.com/thread/23650

bigpinkdragon286 · May 2, 2013

Haha, more than welcome! Good luck with retirement. I like to think I do a little of that every day. I hope it's been entertaining and maybe even a little enlightening for you.

I had fun either way.

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