The Perfect XP - episode 2 : Defragmenting

Ahh yes, the ever puzzling curiosity. To defragment or not.

Defragment has been an option lying deep within the Windows start menu. And it's been there since Windows 95 if memory serves me right. Rearrange files to make windows faster? Why the hell not, right?

Well, let's start with what it's going to do. Rearrange files on the drive(s), piece together large files whose pieces lie all over the place, and finally shove everything as close as possible to the outer edge of the hard disk plates.

Piecing together large fragmented files will make that file(s) faster to access Shoving it to the edge of the plate means faster access to the file as well.

(This works with a little common sense. The disc is a circle, and is read by a 'head' on an 'arm' that starts from the outside of the plate to the inside. If we assume the disk to be spinning at a constant rate(i.e it's maximum, let's say 7200 revolutions per minute(rpm)), it means that the head reads more data per spin of the disk if it was at the periphery than if it was near the centre. And it would be faster to read a whole large file if it was in a large single piece rather than in pieces lying in random places on the disk, causing the head to keep seeking back and forth. This gets better if the disk is a very large one, like say, a 120GB hard disk. The 120GB hard disk will outperform a 60GB hard disk after defragmenting for this reason,but will be more prone to fragmentation because of Window's haphazard method of writing to the hard disk.)

It sounds good. So why not defragment? Why not defragment every day? Or better yet, every hour? (note: Vista defragments in idle periods of activity Meaning if you left it alone for like an hour or so, it would probably have started defragmenting, or 'optimising', or whatever fancy name they gave it)

Well, hard drives do not live forever, however much we wish they would. I myself have seen a 5 year old hard disk experience sudden unexplainable failure. The lives of these drives are measured in terms read/writes done to it, on top of a couple of factors:

-humidity
-temperature
-power stability
-manufacturer quality

Defragmenting is like the mother of all automated read/write activities the average user performs. Imagine if it was done every week. Now, imagine if that drive's contents kept changing (for example,downloading a new movie/song album every week, or log files of firewalls and antivirus programs.) Files will keep getting fragmented, and defragmenting will keep shoving things around.

All this adds up to a considerable workload for the hard disk, if considered at the end of the 52-week year. In short, hard disk failure getting accelerated before it's normal due time.

And should you use Window's built in defragmenter or a 3rd party software?
From my experience, at the end of the defragment, the performance gain is similar. For windows XP, the 3rd party defragmenting program gets the job done faster. But I noticed in Windows Vista, the Windows built-in system defragment was pretty fast.



Conclusion?
Defragment, once a month. No more no less.

Try Defraggler if you're on Windows XP, and stick to window's default defragment if using Vista.

With any luck, you might get a faster start up and better performance. Don't count on data stability or the hard disk being with you till you retire though.


LINUX PIMPIN TIME:
Linux has no defragmenting program. (well, I've seen just ONE before, but it was not popular.) Sound odd?

The explanation for this is rather obscure and varied, but the one that sounds most reasonable to me is that Linux filesystems, like Ext3, store files with preset space for minor changes. And fragmentation of files is avoided at the write step itself. Linux keeps a 'log' of available space/slots of space on the hard disk, and fits files when writing into the best slot possible to reduce or eliminate fragmentation. Therefore, ideally, there will be 0% fragmentation on a sufficiently large and fast hard disk, thus there being no need for crappy work like defragmenting. This will also supposedly extend the life of the hard disk rather considerably if there is active read/writes and changes to the same file (logs and similar files).


End of episode 2. I know you haven't defragmented since the stone age.
Go do it now.