Is This Normal? Defragging Files...

[Soviet Rathe 1]

I have 2 computers, a laptop and a desktop, both running win7 ult 64-bit

 

When I open defraggler on my desktop, these are the files that are fragmented and cannot be defragged because the system is using them.

 

however on my laptop, I can defrag my drive and there won't be any fragmented files, I was a little worried about this, is this normal? could those fragged files become corrupt? - also before you ask, yes my laptop does have a pagefile.

Edited September 15, 2010 by Soviet Rathe (see edit history)

[vhortex 1]

Just a word of advice, never ever defrag your windows 7 file system with any defragmenting tools. Windows 7 is using shadow sector which is a new technology. Each part of your harddrive have a thing called 'shadow' which I still can't fully understand. Even the built-in defrag from windows 7 is not doing much.Windows before version 7 can be defragmented with no worries but Windows 7 can't be defragmented safely. There are times that you can literally destroy your harddrive files.Wait for a few more months or a year more to let Microsoft develop a better technique to defrag Windows 7 and this technology be distributed to third party developers.

[Soviet Rathe 1]

Just a word of advice, never ever defrag your windows 7 file system with any defragmenting tools. Windows 7 is using shadow sector which is a new technology. Each part of your harddrive have a thing called 'shadow' which I still can't fully understand. Even the built-in defrag from windows 7 is not doing much.
Windows before version 7 can be defragmented with no worries but Windows 7 can't be defragmented safely. There are times that you can literally destroy your harddrive files.

Wait for a few more months or a year more to let Microsoft develop a better technique to defrag Windows 7 and this technology be distributed to third party developers.

Where did you get this info? I could not find anything on google that says I shouldn't defragment Windows 7 in fact, defraggler supports Windows 7 officially. here you can see that Microsoft says defraggler is supported! http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows Don't get much more supported then that.

[inea 0]

It seems only 8% of the hard disk is used. So there seems no need to defrag the hard disk. My experience is that defragment is a big load for the hard drive. It seems better not to defrag the hard drive. It seems the hard drive will run soundless when the hard drive never gets defragged.

Edited September 16, 2010 by inea (see edit history)

[Quatrux 4]

Windows 7 is using NTFS which can be defraggmented, and for almost a year I am using Windows 7 and deflagler and regularly am defraggmenting and never had any issues? Maybe I don't use the Shadow service? but I doubt it..The Shadow technology is available for quite a long time for: Windows Server 2003 and above, maybe it now works a bit differently and data is stored in blocks and not in a file or something like that, but as I said before, I am defraggmenting and never had any issues..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_CopyJust leave those files like that and don't worry about them, I mean the files in use and the pagefile.sys and system Volume Information as you don't care about them.

[inea 0]

Windows 7 is using NTFS which can be defraggmented, and for almost a year I am using Windows 7 and deflagler and regularly am defraggmenting and never had any issues? Maybe I don't use the Shadow service? but I doubt it..
The Shadow technology is available for quite a long time for: Windows Server 2003 and above, maybe it now works a bit differently and data is stored in blocks and not in a file or something like that, but as I said before, I am defraggmenting and never had any issues..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

Just leave those files like that and don't worry about them, I mean the files in use and the pagefile.sys and system Volume Information as you don't care about them.

Does your hard disk work without making any noises?
If not, did it make a sound when you bought it?

[Soviet Rathe 1]

Does your hard disk work without making any noises?

If not, did it make a sound when you bought it?

 

Hard Drives in general don't make noise except for when their working, ie: defragmenting or moving large files, but that noise is faint if at all present cause your drive is wrighting data etc.

if your harddrive makes noticeable noise then there could be something wrong with it, how old is your drive/computer?

 

 

It seems only 8% of the hard disk is used. So there seems no need to defrag the hard disk. My experience is that defragment is a big load for the hard drive. It seems better not to defrag the hard drive. It seems the hard drive will run soundless when the hard drive never gets defragged.

 

Seems you don't know what fragmentation is. when a file is fragmented, that means there are pieces of that file scattered on different parts of the drive. when your system tries to read that file, it must jump all over the disk to access all the different parts of the file.

When you defrag your drive, all those fragmented files are rearranged on the disk and put into one string of data, so the files are no longer scattered all over the place and the drive can read them faster.

If you don't defrag your drive those fragmented files can be come corrupt (damaged), so it is important to defrag your drive on a regular basis.

 

so if you don't defrag your drive, your system can and will run slowly and at some point, your whole system can become corrupted and go byebye

[mahesh2k 0]

USB Drives/Flash Drives hardly show that they require any defragment. No matter how much data transfer and deletion you do it never flags for fragmentation. I yet to understand why there is any issue with defragmenting those drives but i guess they are better at file management ? Could be. But if that is the case then why there is open talk about those drives not requiring any defragmentation ?

[vhortex 1]

Shadow sectors on Windows 7 is an updated version, the only defrag that works with no problem was the built-in defrag that Windows have. I called technical support to microsoft when the defrag turns slower and causes random slow down after the process.

It is safe to defrag partitions that is not your system drive/partition without any error. The compatibility check only says that defraggler can run on windows 7 64 bit but it does not say that the software can't harm your system drive. Microsoft told me that the shadow sectors present at Windows 7 is not the same version present on older versions. It is a miss and go process.

The common things that happen when defragging system drives/partition are the following:
1. crashed index or partially damage - can easily be repaired by checkdsk while booting
2. system files being permanently locked up or profile files locked up
3. denial of access for files and marking as system only - this is your case.

Shadow sectors is always on but it was not present on all sectors/files. If you are unlucky and you still defrag your system drive/partition and the system suddenly locks up access to files (shadow sector trigger), you will end up with a messed up harddrive.

I have a badly fragmented 300GB system partition half filled from my 520GB harddrive and no slow down was encountered. However my 200GB 2nd partition that was almost non fragmented was slower when searching/indexing files and sorting them on a tree view.

so if you don't defrag your drive, your system can and will run slowly and at some point, your whole system can become corrupted and go byebye

This is not always true and frequent defrags can literally cause more damage since all the files get scanned and moved around. This causes too much heat on your hard drive and some may experience problems on the long run. Systems are now being aware of this fragmentation problem and they write the data in sectors strategically in a way that few hard drive head spins will be required to read them all. Some hard drive manufacturers are also adding this method on the controller chips.

Base on my experience, most defragmentation software do scatter pieces of your files around the harddrive if you want speed improvements and they will compact (store the file in sequential pcs) if you choose compact mode.

The difference between the 2 was the first one is optimized for speed and yet your files was still fragmented and the second one was optimized for repartitioning (resizing partitions).


Defrag only if you need it.
Edited September 17, 2010 by vhortex (see edit history)

[vhortex 1]

Posting at a new line for ease of reading..

USB Drives/Flash Drives hardly show that they require any defragment. No matter how much data transfer and deletion you do it never flags for fragmentation. I yet to understand why there is any issue with defragmenting those drives but i guess they are better at file management ? Could be. But if that is the case then why there is open talk about those drives not requiring any defragmentation ?

USB and Flash Drives have a maximum Read and Write buffer/counter. Defragging your USB and Flash Drive speeds up its lifespan. When defragging sectors that have data, they get moved to a temporary location if the space they need to occupy still have data. This process already increased way a lot your write counter.

The write counter is in millions or even billion while the read counter is way much bigger than the write counter. This counters are present to ensure that each data writes will be a perfect one. This is the reason why they are never being flagged for defrag.

A thing to notice, if you open a file on your USB/Flash Drive using an editor, the editor software keeps on writing temporary files and some of them writes on your USB/Flash Drive without you knowing it. Microsoft Office before 2007 was doing that.
Edited September 17, 2010 by vhortex (see edit history)