Issues with defragging my HD...

[knightgf]

Edit: See my latest post below for the most up to date information.

Original post:



Alright, I seem to have an issue with defragmenting my hard drive.

The main purpose of defragmentation was to hopefully get better performance client side with DDO:EU, in which the secondary purposes was to get better performance in everything else I do. At first, I tried using the Windows Defrag program, but realized that it wouldn't do a single thing! All it would do is just analyze the HD, defrag for a few seconds, then stop. It pretty much did nothing. Thinking it was just a worthless debugger, I went online and downloaded another debugger, but...as you can see in the screenshot above, it too, only defragged for 2 seconds before stopping.

What the heck? You mean to tell me that, out of 111 GB total on my hard drive, you can't use a mere 8.79 GB to at least defrag half or even a quarter of the hard drive? Bollocks! That's all it is, pure bollocks!

The main questions I have to ask is: How much disk space do I require in order to defragment the entire hard drive? And will it have much of a impact on my performance?

(P.S.: Did you see what topped the list of most defragmented files? Yup, you guessed it, Turbine's to blame once again. It makes me wonder if they bother defragmenting their files before they release them or if they're made so poorly they defragment quickly and painfully...I've even heard rumors that their files can cause memory leaks in the system, and I have no idea if thats true or not...)

[English_Warrior]

[IMG] (P.S.: Did you see what topped the list of most defragmented files? Yup, you guessed it, Turbine's to blame once again. It makes me wonder if they bother defragmenting their files before they release them or if they're made so poorly they defragment quickly and painfully...I've even heard rumors that their files can cause memory leaks in the system, and I have no idea if thats true or not...)

The fragmentation of the DDO files on your PC has nothing to do with Turbine.

"makes me wonder if they bother degfragmenting the files before they release them"....you clearly have no idea what fragmentation is....or how it occurs.

[uhgungawa]

It defragged for a whopping 2 seconds? LOL

[English_Warrior]

To answer your question.... its usually 15% of total partition space (not total hard drive space).

To free up more room try running disk cleanup, reduce the size allocated for your recycle bin and reduce the size of any hard drive space reserved for system restore.

[cdbd3rd]

Have had a couple nasty bugs in the past that would block any sort of clean-up of the drive. You've got current & active AV running, right?

The fragmentation of the DDO files on your PC has nothing to do with Turbine. nor Bethesda, nor Ubersoft, nor... etc.

"makes me wonder if they bother degfragmenting the files before they release them"....you clearly have no idea what fragmentation is....or how it occurs.

Oh, and this ^ is spot on, including my amendment.

[lolwatboomer]

(P.S.: Did you see what topped the list of most defragmented files? Yup, you guessed it, Turbine's to blame once again. It makes me wonder if they bother defragmenting their files before they release them or if they're made so poorly they defragment quickly and painfully...I've even heard rumors that their files can cause memory leaks in the system, and I have no idea if thats true or not...)

what

?

[Kriogen]

Delete junk on your hard drive. Delete, not move to Recycle Bin.

Things like TEMP folder, temporary internet files, recycle bin, pr0n, stuff. Maybe even uninstall stuff you never use.

You only have 100GB drive? Kinda small. Have seen USB memory sticks bigger then that.

[Missing_Minds]

(P.S.: Did you see what topped the list of most defragmented files? Yup, you guessed it, Turbine's to blame once again. It makes me wonder if they bother defragmenting their files before they release them or if they're made so poorly they defragment quickly and painfully...I've even heard rumors that their files can cause memory leaks in the system, and I have no idea if thats true or not...)

Congratulations, you've just showed how computer illiterate you are when it comes to maintenance. NEVER get into the IT field please. Ever.

The rumor is pure BS, btw.

And the reason why it is fragmented is because... forget it. you've already shown you wouldn't understand the answer.

[Anthem]

(P.S.: Did you see what topped the list of most defragmented files? Yup, you guessed it, Turbine's to blame once again. It makes me wonder if they bother defragmenting their files before they release them or if they're made so poorly they defragment quickly and painfully...I've even heard rumors that their files can cause memory leaks in the system, and I have no idea if thats true or not...)

The far right column of your screenshot probably gives you a hint at what the cause might be. To me it looks like you don't have enough of something. Also, I'm about ready to +rep you just for that "defrag before release" thing. That's pure gold, and I'm gonna use that on my company's devs when they release our next revison.

Edit: And the irony of your signature is not lost on us. Now we ...have a riddle for you.

[PopeJual]

Delete junk on your hard drive. Delete, not move to Recycle Bin.

Things like TEMP folder, temporary internet files, recycle bin, pr0n, stuff. Maybe even uninstall stuff you never use.

You say this as if pr0n is stuff we never use...

If the question is whether to delete your DDO or your pr0n, then the answer is to get a bigger hard drive.

[Captain_Wizbang]

Try this defrag!
It's free and extremely fast!
http://smart-defrag.en.softonic.com/download#pathbar

[knightgf]

Congratulations, you've just showed how computer illiterate you are when it comes to maintenance. NEVER get into the IT field please. Ever.

No worries. Im not even planning to go into college, and I absolutely hated my Trigonometry and Algebra III courses, so the probability of that happening is ZERO.

The far right column of your screenshot probably gives you a hint at what the cause might be. To me it looks like you don't have enough of something. Also, I'm about ready to +rep you just for that "defrag before release" thing. That's pure gold, and I'm gonna use that on my company's devs when they release our next revison.

Ah yes, that would be I apparently don't have enough hard drive space. I guess somehow, 8 gigs is not enough to defrag a 2.04 GB file, so it looks like im gonna need to free up additional space.

Edit: And the irony of your signature is not lost on us. Now we ...have a riddle for you.

Oh oh, I know what this riddle is! Is it, "What do you call people who defrag a computer for one day and apparently know everything?"

I know the answer to that! Knights.

Delete junk on your hard drive. Delete, not move to Recycle Bin.

Things like TEMP folder, temporary internet files, recycle bin, pr0n, stuff. Maybe even uninstall stuff you never use.

Ah yes, I used disk cleanup to help free up some space, and I'll probably look through my folders to see if there's anything else that needs deleting. As well as delete unnecessary programs. I think there's a lot more to be discovered in my hard drive...

You only have 100GB drive? Kinda small. Have seen USB memory sticks bigger then that.

I've seen external hard drives that are bigger than 100GB, but not a USB stick...not yet...and I wouldn't be surprised, back in the day, some people thought that 3 MB was a lot...

And I have approximately 111 total GB on my hard drive...not much, but it gets the job done.

[Missing_Minds]

I use **** cleaner to find the junk files to get rid of.

I've also used it to clean up my registry on occassion.

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

[Quijonsith]

If you free up some space, even without defragging, you'll notice an overall performance increase. I had only about 6 gigs free on my 60gb main harddrive (laptop) and when I freed that up to 12gb free it was quite noticeable.

As for defragging a 2gb file, when you defrag you don't just defrag one file or set of files you defrag the entire harddrive. 8gb is not enough room to reorganize all the files on your drive. That 8gb isn't all in one place, it's split up in chunks all over the harddrive. The files themselves when not regularly defragmented are also split up in chunks all over the hard drive, thus when one fragmented file is accessed it takes longer to read because the drive has to read from several different physical locations for the one file.

I recently purchased a 1tb network hard dive that I am now migrating my music, pictures, and other large files to that I don't need constant access to. Since doing so there has been a nice performance increase due to the free space on my hard drive.

[UltraMonk2]

And I have approximately 111 total GB on my hard drive...not much, but it gets the job done.

If you are having those problems, then it isn't getting the job done at all.

If you manage to clear up enough space to be able to do the disk defrag it is probably going to take a while with that high level of fragmentation. I'd also recommend that after your initial defrag that you run the program twice more to make sure.

I have no idea if that is a laptop you are using or not, but if it is a normal pc, then hard drives are cheap. Get yourself another hard drive, add that into your pc as an extra drive, then install DDO onto that hard drive. I have an extra drive in my pc dedicated just for my games.

[knightgf]

After going through my PC and deleting stuff I didnt use, there was a HUGE, HUGE boost in my free HD space. I went from 8 GB to about 32.3 GB last I checked(and slowly growing). The number of files/directories also went down a HUGE amount, to the point where I have only 36 as my defrag program is running. The main goal of the whole defragmentation program was to simply see if defragging the DDO files will improve performance. Will it do so? Assuming that I find a way to defrag the DDO related files, most likely, since I have much more HD space. However, that doesn't mean its certain to...

I seemed to also have misinterpreted some of the workings of a defrag program...normally, I assumed that, when a file is defragged, the file and all its fragments are gathered up in some free space, put back together and then put back someplace in the hard drive. How wrong I was...

Edit: I still cannot seem to be able to defrag the DDO:EU files, despite the fact that I now have about 39 GB of free space. I've heard somewhere before that there's a special type of fragmentation that cannot be fixed by a program and that the only way to cure it is to reinstall the program. Is that what im going to need to do in order to defrag the DDO files?

[UltraMonk2]

I seemed to also have misinterpreted some of the workings of a defrag program...normally, I assumed that, when a file is defragged, the file and all its fragments are gathered up in some free space, put back together and then put back someplace in the hard drive. How wrong I was...

Yes and no, if your free space is also fragmented and all over the place then it really won't be able to put it all into one place. The largest file I saw in your list was 2gb. In that case the system needs 2gb of continous free space to put the file into so that it won't be fragmented.

Hence my suggestion of running the disk defrag tool multiple times, first it will take care of the files it can fragment properly and subsequent runnings should do the rest.

Yes you will see a performance increase, but as to how much I am unable to tell you. I've seen systems dramatically increase their performance from a good cleanup.

I'd also recommend you do a full spyware scan, just in case there are any nasties lurking around. Spybot - Search and Destroy (www.safer-networking.org) is a good tool for that, make sure it is fully updated before doing the scan.

[Spoonwelder]

Congratulations, you've just showed how computer illiterate you are when it comes to maintenance. NEVER get into the IT field please. Ever.

The rumor is pure BS, btw.

And the reason why it is fragmented is because... forget it. you've already shown you wouldn't understand the answer.

How do you people learn.....one way is to go to school for years and come out all squeaky clean and knowing EVERYTHING and letting everyone else know it. The second way is from trying, failing, fixing mistakes and trying again. Seems to me like this guy used a resource to see if there was any known problem with DDO w/r/t defragging. Could he have gone to a better source, researched more before asking etc....yeah probably but it is a viable option to post a question on an open forum and get an answer. He did that and hasn't complained about the flame responses yet. But give this person a break.

I still remember one of my first IT mistakes to this day...deleting command.com. The next hour was spent covering my ass while I fixed the mistake. I learned from that, I kept my job and for the past 15 years later I have been one of the go to guys at work for all basic desktop and minor server related stuff. That said I have learned what I don't know can 'kill me' so I bring in the consultants for anything big.

[Anthem]

The main goal of the whole defragmentation program was to simply see if defragging the DDO files will improve performance. Will it do so?

The main performance increase from a defrag will be in loading times when zoning -- while the game is moving new maps and textures into RAM. If you're also a bit short on memory, then paging to and from disk and RAM will also be a bit faster, but still a rough performance hit, and it's one that affects gameplay more than loading.

Don't stress too much about that 2GB file still showing some fragmentation. There are different levels of fragmentation, and having it in two or three large fragments is still a whole lot better than sixty or a hundred-and-sixty (or 69,339!) small fragments. Reinstalling seems a bit overboard for the gains you'd get. NTFS is an obsolete filesystem and we all have to deal with it until MS finally develops or adopts a modern FS.

PS. Good on you for taking the flames and criticisms so well, mine included. I'm humbled by your high road on that.

[Missing_Minds]

How do you people learn.....

Three. "Read." Funny that. The primary way to learn things on your own.

The follow up to this is..

Four. "Ask questions." And then seek out answers to them. You don't come in acting like a know it all and blaming people.