Performance issues with Disk Defragmenter

[VistaNewbie]

Okay, I give up. I've got a 750 GB partition that I've been defragmenting
for over 24 hours so far - the process is still not complete.

The first time I tried defragmenting, I used the GUI tool at start -> all
programs -> accessories -> system tools and finally
cancelled everything after about 28 hours because it still hadn't finished.
So, about a week later (yesterday morning), I decided to try out the command
line tool, defrag.exe, to see if I could at least get some more information
on progress, and perhaps a quicker defrag experience.

I ran the following command to defrag everything: "defrag.exe D: -r -v",
then I changed the priority of defrag.exe and dfrgntfs.exe to "Above Normal"
in task manager.

Here I am 26 hours later and the process is still not complete and I have no
information on what progress has been made or how much time is remaining. I
know it isn't hanging simply from looking at the I/O performance counters,
but man this is taking a long time and I still have one more 750 GB
partition
that needs to be defragmented...

My question is "How do I make the disk defragmenter go faster or provide
more information?".

Thanks.

 

[Richard Urban]

No matter what you do, defragmenting a 750 gig drive is going to take many
hours. Accept it.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[VistaNewbie]

Uhhhh, thanks for the comment......Yes, I know this is going to take a
while.

So, to ask my original question again: How do I make the disk defragmenter
go faster or provide more information?

Any tips/tricks would be appreciated.

 

[Lucvdv]

Uhhhh, thanks for the comment......Yes, I know this is going to take a
while.

So, to ask my original question again: How do I make the disk defragmenter
go faster or provide more information?

AFAIK, you can't.

You could try out Diskeeper (30 day fully functional trial available):
it will give more information, but I don't know if that's the sort of
information you want/need.

They claim it's faster too.


How much free space is there on the drive, and how badly is it
fragmented? If it's nearly full (meaning there are several fragmented
files larger than the largest block of free space), defragmenting may
take a _looooong_ time (unless your defragmenter is smart enough to
leave those files alone - I don't know if Vista's is).

The longest I've ever known was with PerfectDisk (commercial
defragmenter) back in the NT4 days, on a disk of only 250 MB, but
nearly full: I stopped it after a week.

Then instead of defragmenting, I backed it up, reformatted, and
restored the backup. Took significantly less time, and a
backup/format/restore cycle has as a side effect that it defragments
your files...

 

[VistaNewbie]

Thanks for the help. Both disks are 750 GB each and they both have about 50%
free space with 16% file fragmentation. I finally canceled the defrag job
against the first disk after about 36 hours. It had gone from 16% to 2% file
fragmentation after the cancellation....

Vista's defragmenter probably does a much more thorough job, and I'm
imagining it is only meant to run on idle system process, which is why it
probably goes so slow. Changing the priority of the processes it runs under
seems to have little effect. So, I checked out a few programs, and found a
free one that had received some good reviews - Auslogics Disk Defrag. I used
that on the second disk and it went from 16% file fragmentation to 0% in
about four or five hours. Much, much quicker results, but I am weary about
using a 3rd party (freeware) app for something as important as this.

Anyway - thanks for the backup/format/restore tip. I'll give it a try the
next time around to compare results.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 16:08:49 -0400, "Richard Urban"

No matter what you do, defragmenting a 750 gig drive is going to take many
hours. Accept it.

Processes that take "many hours" need a proper UI and progress
feedback. Especially true for processes that continuously write
files, and are thus likely to eat data if you bad-exit. See...

http://cquirke.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C7DAB1E724AB8C23!303.entry

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"If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have
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