How often to defragment?

[Ken K]

How often is it necessary to defragment a Win2K system?

I know that earlier versions needed to be defragmented daily or even
multiple times during the day. Does Win2K need to be defragmented as
frequently? (I have it as my OS on three home systems. )

Thanks
Ken K

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Ken K" <[email protected]>

| How often is it necessary to defragment a Win2K system?
|
| I know that earlier versions needed to be defragmented daily or even
| multiple times during the day. Does Win2K need to be defragmented as
| frequently? (I have it as my OS on three home systems. )
|
| Thanks
| Ken K

Depends on what you do.

Usually once per month is good. Onece every two weeks if you have much data modifications
occuring on the hard disk.

 

[Crouchie1998]

I defrag every month, but its entirely up-to-you.

I repaired someones machine a few weeks ago & that hadn't be defragged for
4.88 years - not good!!

Crouchie1998
BA (HONS) MCP MCSE

 

[Rob Stow]

How often is it necessary to defragment a Win2K system?

I know that earlier versions needed to be defragmented daily or even
multiple times during the day. Does Win2K need to be defragmented as
frequently? (I have it as my OS on three home systems. )

It depends a *lot* on what you do with each particular partition.

At home, I have 6 partitions on two hard drives.

The W2K boot/system partition and two of the data partitions get
automatically defragged daily and they seldom take more than a
couple of minutes each.

The other two data partitions I defrag manually according to how
much I have done with those partitions. I quite often just let
the defragger analyze the drive and if it detects more than a few
dozen fragmented files I will tell it to go ahead and defrag the
drive. Those partitions are big (90 GB each) and can take hours
to defrag so I seldom defrag unless the analysis reveals a need
for it. I also defrag before doing something like editting
videos - which can benefit a lot from have a 20 GB contiguous
block of free space instead of having it scattered the free space
scattered all over the place.

The sixth partition is currently "available for future use". It
was last used to test the XP-64 beta.

 

[Enkidu]

How often is it necessary to defragment a Win2K system?

I know that earlier versions needed to be defragmented
daily or even multiple times during the day. Does Win2K
need to be defragmented as frequently? (I have it as
my OS on three home systems. )

I never defrag. I haven't since NT4. It doesn't seem to have
much effect and anyway, on my XP systems, if I do decide to
play around with defrag, there usually little to do. I just
checked and all four of my volumes report that they do not
need to be defragged. And I haven't played with it for a
loooooong time.

IF you have small disks and IF they are really full, then
maybe you could benefit from a defrag. Maybe. But you could
also go and buy some bigger disks and forget about defrag.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Enkidu" <[email protected]>


| I never defrag. I haven't since NT4. It doesn't seem to have
| much effect and anyway, on my XP systems, if I do decide to
| play around with defrag, there usually little to do. I just
| checked and all four of my volumes report that they do not
| need to be defragged. And I haven't played with it for a
| loooooong time.
|
| IF you have small disks and IF they are really full, then
| maybe you could benefit from a defrag. Maybe. But you could
| also go and buy some bigger disks and forget about defrag.
|
| Cheers,
|
| Cliff
|
| --
|
| Barzoomian the Martian - http://barzoomian.blogspot.com

I keep my OE6 folder on Drive "D:" (D:\Exchange) and find that when it is slow to open a
news group DBX file, a defrag will speed it right up with 62% free space.

BTW: I keep the TEMP folder, IE cache, Mozilla FireFox cache and Java cache on the drive
"D:" as well.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

How often is it necessary to defragment a Win2K system?

I know that earlier versions needed to be defragmented daily or even
multiple times during the day.

Earlier versions of what? Certainly no version of Windows ever needed
such frequent defragmentation.

Does Win2K need to be defragmented as
frequently?

No, of course not. Nor does any other OS I've ever heard of. The
frequency of defragmentation depends entirely upon the use to which you
put your computer, and the type and size of the files being moved about
(or added and deleted) on the hard drives. Be that as it may, weekly is
more than sufficient for most purposes, and quarterly is generally
sufficient for most workstations.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

Kind of like asking somehow how often to put gas in your car - as often as
necessary

Seriously, it should be done as often as you think necessarity to maintain
optimal file system/drive performance. If you consolidate free space when
you defragment, then most drives can get by with performing weekly.
Otherwise, you might need to perform more frequently. This all depends on
what the drive is used for. Drives that are primarily read only will not
re-fragment quickly. Drives that are primarily write can tend to
re-fragment quickly.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.