How long does defrag take?

[Chad Harris]

I defrag with PD nearly every day or every other or 2-3 days. I off line
defrag every week, and every so often I defrag the paging file and the mft
at boot. I'm on the boxes a good bit, and I'm rewarded with an increase in
speed. Defragging the largest and most active drives usually is 30-40
minutes max, sometimes faster, and the others are much faster.

I have never seen the phenom in the latest build of PD where SR points on
Vista are impacted ala a dual boot where someone feels the need that I don't
understand at all to boot to XP unless they need to copy an OE email or just
check it generally (because you can put a shortcut to the XP desktop or any
of its files and folders on the Vista desktop and reach it with a single
click).

CH

 

[Richard G. Harper]

Sadly, that's the way it is. No feedback, when it completes it completes.


--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User] (e-mail address removed)
* NEW! Catch my blog ... http://msmvps.com/blogs/rgharper/
* PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
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* HELP us help YOU ... http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm

 

[Robert Moir]

Hi

thanks for the replies to all

I have not used the PC since I started Defrag, is there a way to increase
the priority
for CPU and RAM usage?

You don't need to. If nothing else is happening then defrag will use all the
resources it wants and needs. Low priority simply means the program will
'get out of the way' if something else wants the same resources. As you're
not using the computer, hence not pushing defrag out of the way, this isn't
the issue.

You might want to check that another background task (virus scan? spyware
scan? Indexing?) isn't running at the same time. That will cause poor
performance for defrag (and again the answer is to reign in the runaway
program, not to fiddle with defrag's priority).

 

[Chad Harris]

You can use task manager to increase priority if you right click an Item>Set
Priority on the processes tab.

CH

 

[mikeyhsd]

one of the main reasons I use Auslogics Disk Defrag. got those neat moving boxes too.

fast FREE and works on xp and vista 32 and 64 bit systems.



(e-mail address removed)



Hi

I have a PC running Vista Ultimate, it has the following specs
CPU- P4 3.2 HT
2.5 Gig RAM
256 Meg Graphics Card.
2 x 160 Gig Hard Drives (1 is 10,000RPM)

Both hard Dives are a bit less that 40% full.

Defrag has has been running for 14 hours so far,
is that normal? (last defrag was in May)

thanks

Daniel

 

[Robert Moir]

Only done it once so far as I have only had the PC a week, but it took
quite a few hours on my PC. However, that was only one drive and it was
fairly empty.

One of the things I don't like is that it gives you no feedback AT ALL on
what it is doing and how long it will be.

I don't know if you remember the Windows 98 defrag, it took forever, but
at least you could see what it was doing and because you knew it was going
to take a long time, you would do it over night. Windows XP was good,
because it was quick and you could see what is was doing.

I have no problems with it taking a while if it needs to, as long as you
know it's going to take a while. But, when it just says 'This may take
from a few minutes, to a few hours', this is very, very poor!

You have to understand that Vista isn't Windows 98. It isn't even XP. Things
work differently, perhaps better or perhaps worse, but it helps to
understand that and keep it in mind.

Defrag is a case in point. Users of other operating systems besides Windows
don't obsess over disk fragmentation. Many of them don't even know it can be
a problem. Why? Because their operating system takes care of things in the
background, without bothering them.

This is what Microsoft are trying to move towards, hence the dearth of
information on the defrag process. If you want to watch something while
defrag is running, then put in a DVD or something.

Another reason, as covered in previous posts here and a couple of blog
entries, Microsoft's file system team basically found that defrag was lying
to you. That thing you used to watch had very little to do with what was
actually happening on your disk, and as hard disks got bigger and bigger
this information was only going to become less useful. So we're back to
popping in a DVD if you need to watch something while defrag is running. A
quick burst of whatever movie or TV series you enjoy will be far more
enjoyable than the defrag screen, and have about as much relevance to what
is taking place on your disk.

Of course, if you don't like that answer you could buy one of the many third
party defrag programs out there, as these still give you pretty pictures to
watch. Have to show you where the money went, after all! But except in a few
special circumstances (you've just upgraded, or made other major changes to
the disk contents, you're running a server of some kind that generates lots
of file activity, etc), I doubt these will actually give you any improvement
in performance over just letting the scheduled defragger process run and do
its thing, coupled with running a manual defrag every month or two.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying defrag doesn't matter. It does. It
certainly should be part of your regular maintenance tasks on your computer
(whether carried out by you or by the job scheduler), but why does it need
to be something you sit and watch?

 

[Dennis Pack]

John:
I've been using Diskeeper 2007 Pro or Pro-Premier without any
problems on Vista x64 since the beta's were released.

 

[Iuvenalis]

Hi

I have a PC running Vista Ultimate, it has the following specs
CPU- P4 3.2 HT
2.5 Gig RAM
256 Meg Graphics Card.
2 x 160 Gig Hard Drives (1 is 10,000RPM)

Both hard Dives are a bit less that 40% full.

Defrag has has been running for 14 hours so far,
is that normal? (last defrag was in May)

thanks

Daniel

Check your free disk space.
I saw Vista defrag slowly eat up all free space on a disk once when it was
left defragging for many hours.
Personally I wouldn't use the built in tool, I prefer Pefectdisk or OO.

 

[Ray Rogers]

What I meant was not what I said, it just came out wrong. Should have been:

Actually, why don't we all pretend that there is no defrag anymore,
let's pretend that Microsoft rejigged the file system so that it doesn't get
fragmented ;-)

Meaning that there's no reason on earth to sit there and watch little
coloured boxes move around, it works in the background and does a reasonable
job, so let's just move on and enjoy our lives.

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Unfortunately, it defaults to defragging everything, instead of just, say,
Vista's volume. I've modified the task so that it only deals with the system
partition (my data volumes see very little fragmentation, so I don't bother
with them on an automated basis), which is 32GB and somewhat less than half
full. So far, the best time it's achieved on a weekly basis is just less
than an hour, which seems long to me, very long. And Defrag doesn't even
default to defragging a volume fully, but knows when to cut its losses and
ignore certain things that would take too much time. It does run in the
middle of the night, so it's not like it's a bother to me, but a defrag
running for hours on end can't be a benefit to a drive's longevity.

 

[Guest]

Hi Daniel,

I think 14 hours seems a bit long for defrag to run, but in Vista I have
found that when you do a defrag it does it to all drives and partitions where
earlier versions you could select a drive and just do it. As an example;
normally defrag only takes 30-40 minutes on my machine but yesterday I added
120 gig of music to one of my HDD and then I ran defrag and it took 2 hours
to do.

 

[Plato]

I have a PC running Vista Ultimate, it has the following specs
CPU- P4 3.2 HT
2.5 Gig RAM
256 Meg Graphics Card.
2 x 160 Gig Hard Drives (1 is 10,000RPM)

Both hard Dives are a bit less that 40% full.

Defrag has has been running for 14 hours so far,
is that normal? (last defrag was in May)

Internet cache files and temp files can add hours do defraggings. Delete
all your temp files first, including internet cache.

 

[occam]

The same PC used to run XP and Defrag to a couple of hours in total.

cheers

Daniel

Daniel

Have you thought about using a 3d party defragger (rather than the
vanilla defragger of Vista?)

I recommend JKDefrag (currently v3.16) - it is fast, open source, and
informs as it goes...