Defragmenting Hard Drive

[manuleka 0]

I have a 640GB Hard Disk drive and it is filled with a lot of stuff... I have two Operating systems running from this drive (Linux and Windows)... Linux can view all Windows Partition, Windows can't view Linux Ext4 partitions...My question is, if i'm going to defrag the drive, which OS and tool should i use? Would it really matter if i Use Linux or Windows?cheers

[yordan 10]

If your hard drive is really full, you cannot defrag <_<Have a look at the defrag progs you have, but most of them need at least 10 to 20% free space in order to be able to perform the defrag.And, of course, the answer is obvious : you need a Windows defrag for the Windows disks, and a Linux defrag for the Linux part.I use defraggler for my Windows disks. Unfortunately, it's not supported for Linux.

[manuleka 0]

If your hard drive is really full, you cannot defrag <_<Have a look at the defrag progs you have, but most of them need at least 10 to 20% free space in order to be able to perform the defrag.
And, of course, the answer is obvious : you need a Windows defrag for the Windows disks, and a Linux defrag for the Linux part.
I use defraggler for my Windows disks. Unfortunately, it's not supported for Linux.

so defragmenting the NTFS partitions on Linux wouldn't be a good idea? there's plenty of space though

[yordan 10]

You will have to do quite a big job on the file descriptors of the NTFS disk. Windows is the best choice for doing that.

[manuleka 0]

right... thanks yordan

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

While discussing the best of defragmenting a hard drive, can someone elaborate the benefits of defragmentation.

[manuleka 0]

While discussing the best of defragmenting a hard drive, can someone elaborate the benefits of defragmentation.

re-organizing data on the drive, grouping related data together increase performance and also i think (not too sure) it does identify bad sectors as well...

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

How much performance increase are we talking about here?

[yordan 10]

Depends on what you name performance.Having to do a single I/O unstead several ones, means that each I/0 action will last several times less. In some cases, you can reduce your writing time by 90%

[manuleka 0]

How much performance increase are we talking about here?

varies depending on your drive and its physical state, connections etc... and what kinda of data, and softwares running on it...

i did a defragmentation before on my laptop which has on 256GB HDD and the speed of accessing it was quite noticable after that

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

Depends on what you name performance.Having to do a single I/O unstead several ones, means that each I/0 action will last several times less. In some cases, you can reduce your writing time by 90%

I have a 500 gigs hard drive. It has 3 NTFS partitions and one EXT4 partiotion. On average, the hard diskt is about 80% full. And last time I ran disk defrag utility was some 6 months ago.

If I perform a disk defragment, should I expect faster speeds in processes that continually read and write data to hard drive.

[yordan 10]

You should expect faster speeds in processes read-most/write-once.If you create a big file, rename it, create a second one, remove the first one, it will go faster as long as the disk is 5% fragmented, and will slow down as soon as your disk start being over 40% fragmented.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

You should expect faster speeds in processes read-most/write-once.

What common computer process would fall into this category?

[yordan 10]

What common computer process would fall into this category?

We should define what "common" means.
What do you do with your computer? What kind of files are flling your big hard disk, and which process created them? Do you watch on your computer the movies you made using your camera? Or do you create pictures using a graphic pad?

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

We should define what "common" means.What do you do with your computer? What kind of files are flling your big hard disk, and which process created them? Do you watch on your computer the movies you made using your camera? Or do you create pictures using a graphic pad?

Ok... So here is what I normally do on my computer..

On a normal day when I turn my computer on, the first thing I always do is open up firefox and check my Email. Then I check my adsense account to see previous day's earnings. After that, if the schedule for the day ahead is not very busy, I open up the Xisto forum and see if there are any new topics to which I can contribute. I may then watch some news etc...

Normally I would then turn the computer off and return to my offline life. Most of the time I spend on my computer is in the evening and night. During this time I manage my downloads, uploads and shares. Sometimes the files are very large and sometimes very small. One thing I do alot is I copy lots of stuff from USB sticks. The Blu-ray drive on my laptop is not functioning well so any thing I have to bring into my computer is via USB or Internet. If I have to watch some movie, I would first copy the movie into the usb stick from the movie dvd using my friend's computer and then I would copy the movie into my laptop's hard drive. The same goes for software and games...

In short there is lots of copying pasting going on... And I do watch movies alot.

One other thing I do alot is writing (using microsoft word 2010). But my guess is that because the file size of these documents is so small, the defragment thing is hardly going to have any effect on this.

I do edit images using my graphics tablet and adobe photoshop but mostly the images are small in size (as they are mostly intended for my website). The image size rarely goes beyond 1 mb. Movie editing is not my thing yet. I don't do it.

Furthermore when I am doing some project related to development, I use software like aptana studio, dreamweaver etc..

In short, most of the time I spend on my computer is spent either with firefox or watching movies.