Talk:Defragmentation

message: Fragmentation is a general challenge in the field of File system design. Some filesystems are more fragmentation than others, and some feature integrated background defragmentation. It would be useful to expand this article to cover the subject of defragmentation in all of it's forms.Gmaxwell 23:22, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: OS Centric

message: OS X and its built-in defragmentation deserve some sort of a mention expansion in this article. I still think it would be worthy to go into detail on how it works. —Rob (talk) 15:13, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  OS X and auto-defragmentation 

message: Perhaps it's worth mentioning O&O Defrag, which greatly improves upon the standard defragmentation software included. You can read more about it here: http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/info/
Please note: 
"O&O Defrag V8 Professional Edition is compatible with Windows XP, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. The Professional Edition cannot be used on Windows 2003/2000/NT servers.
O&O Defrag V8 Professional Edition and O&O Defrag V8 Server Edition cannot be installed on computers running Windows 95/98/ME."
I will not be editing the article, do as you please. boaub
I tried adding a stub article on O&O Defrag, but it got deleted, citing "notability". I wasn't about to explain that O&O software is a European company and is therefore not that well known in the USA, where the deleter seemed to come from. Donn Edwards 15:32, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Please see the notability guideline on how to establish notability. -- intgr #%@! 18:50, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Defragmentation software for Windows 

message: Is there a big advantage if you use a special defragmentation tool and not that internal thing in Windows XP? 172.174.23.201 22:56, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The internal defragmenter can have problems on severely fragmented partitions which contain mostly large files.  During defragmentation it requires that a block of continueous free space is available as large as the file it is trying to defragment.  However, sometimes the free space on a drive can be so fragmented that it is impossible for the defragmenter to even defragment a single file.  This only occurs on partitions that have many large files that have been growing (in parallel) for long periods of time (like a download partition) which are then subsequently removed to be stored elsewhere.--John Hendrikx 09:44, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Windows XP Defrag vs. Other Tools 

message: I was somewhat dissatisfied with this article in the current state, so I decided to approach the problem from another angle in the new article "file system fragmentation". More details about my motivation at Talk:File system fragmentation#Reasons for duplicating "defragmentation" article. Please don't suggest a merge just yet. I would like to hear anyone's thoughts, comments, and criticisms though. -- intgr 03:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: New article titled "[[file system fragmentation]]"

message: I reverted this recently-added statement from the article since it did not tie into the text, although it does point out that the performance results/improvements are not as black and white as the article makes it sound.
:Although it may produce substantial filesystem speed improvements in some cases, for the typical Windows user the overall performance improvement may be minor or unnoticeable( this information IS NOT CORRECT (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_13_4/ai_55349694).
Although I do realize that even though benchmarks may point out an X% increase in performance, the user might not notice it, since the performance was never a problem to begin with. But anyway, if anyone can find the time, some of this should find its way to the article. And note that the current POV in the particular section is unsourced as well. -- intgr 22:14, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Defrag and performance improvements

message: What I didn't see in the article is that there are really two goals in defragmentation, to defragment files and to defragment the remaining free space.  The latter is by far the more important one to prevent new fragmentation from occuring.  If free space is severely fragmented to begin with, the filesystem will have no choice but to fragment newly added files.  Free space fragmentation is the biggest cause of file fragmentation for almost any filesystem.  It is the reason why experts as a general rule say you should always keep a certain amount of free space available to prevent fragmentation.  Letting disks fill up and then removing files and letting them fill up again will result in bad fragmentation as the filesystem will have no choice but to fill the remaining gaps to store data instead of making a more educated guess from other free areas.  Note that even this rule will not remove the need for defragmentation, it just delays it.--John Hendrikx 10:22, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Free space defragmentation

message: FAT file systems suffer badly from fragmentation of the directory system. Defrag systems that defragmented the directory system made a dramatic difference. Cut down defrag systems that did not defrag the directory system made very little difference except to people intensively using very large files. NTFS has a different and more complex meta-data system. NTFS directories are less susceptible to fragmentation. File fragmentation on NTFS, as on a FAT or Unix file system, normally makes very little difference, and defrag systems that only defrag the files normally make very little difference. You need a third party defrag utility to defrag the meta-data on NTFS partition, and if the meta-data has become badly fragmented, defragmentation of it makes a dramatic difference. If you optimise a file to one location on disk, but the meta-data is spread out, you've gained nothing, and a defrag the only defrags the files does nothing for you. 
PerfectDisk claims to be the only defrag utility that successfully defrags metadata RitaSkeeter 17:00, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  defrag meta-data 

message: Aren't there risks associated with the abusing of defragmentation on a hard drive? WinterSpw 17:24, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose that excessive churning increases the wear on the parts, but can't cite a source.  Tempshill 20:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Defragmentation software vendors claim that less seeking with a defragmented drive more than compensates for the wear done during the defragmentation process; I don't think any studies have been done to test this. However, Google's study on hard disk reliability indicates that there is very little correlation between hard disk load and failure rate. -- intgr #%@! 22:33, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Steve Gibson, author of Spinrite, claimed on the Security Now podcast that "excessive" defragmentation would only reduce the lifetime of the drive to the extent that the drive was being used during the defragmentation process. HTH! RitaSkeeter 17:03, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Risks for defragmentation? 

message: The Apple II had a couple of utilities that would defrag its 5.25" floppy disks.  I was glad at the attempts in this article to try and approach this as a general issue for all operating systems and disk types.  I think the article might benefit from brief mentions of non-hard disk defragmenting: the lack of a benefit for Flash drives would be useful to mention.  Tempshill 20:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed; conceptually, defragmentation (and fragmentation) relates to file systems, not storage media (e.g. floppies or disks). This article should be more careful with its use of the term "disk". -- intgr #%@! 16:26, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Apple II

message: Does anyone know about the history of the defragger? I tried looking it up, but don't care enough to look further. However, a mentor of mine told me that the defrag program was designed for a contest that Intel threw a decade or three ago (not sure at all)...
Intel: We have a super good processor! No one can make it max out! No one! In fact, we will give prize money to whoever CAN max it out, because we just KNOW no one can!
Some guy: Hah! I made a program that defragments your hard disk! It's useless, but it's so energy consuming that it maxes out your processor!
Intel: Dangit, there goes our money!
Some guy: Bwahahahah!
Well, I'll assume people saw a big use in it, but obviously it was too slow at the time.
Anyway, I'd research it myself, but I can't find anything and don't care to delve further. I'd put it up, but I don't remember the whole deal, don't have sources, and don't know if this story is even right!
DEMONIIIK (talk) 03:58, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  History of the Defragmenter 

message: I just skimmed through this article, it seems to have several fairly serious problems. The foremost is that the explanation of fragmentation describes how the old, deprecated msdos file system (fat, fat16, fat32) works. This filesystem was so badly prone to fragmentation that even microsoft abandoned it  ... what ... over a decade ago, now? ... by introducing ntfs, and slowly incorporating it into its windows product line. 
I'd like to see a discussion of fragmentation avoidance strategies.  I think many of these have now been developed; I was hoping to see some discussion of their merits, and relative performance. A discussion of things like wear-levelling for usb sticks (flash ram) would also be appropriate.(think of wear-leveling as a fragmentation-avoidance in time rather than in space; the goal is to use sectors evenly, so that one part of flash doesn't wear out prematurely.  In general, flash drives don't have the seek-time problem (or less of one) so the fragmentation issue is not the problem like it is for hard drives. Rather, its the wear that becomes more of a consideration.  67.100.217.180 (talk) 19:19, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misleading explantation, lack of discussion of alternate strategies 

message: Are there any studies or benchmarks on the performance of a badly fragmented RAID5 array versus a defragmented RAID5 array?  Or any other RAID levels for that matter? Since the data is physically fragmented amongst multiple drives, does logical fragmentation of files matter?  My intuition says it does matter, but has less impact on performance than fragmentation on a single drive.  Could fragmentation lead to a file being unevenly distributed amongst the drives (i.e., more than 50% of a file on a single drive in a three-drive RAID5 array)?  I'm not an expert, so sorry if that seems ludicrous. I'd like a reliable study which shows whether it makes a difference or not, and if so, to what extent. dejaphoenix (talk) 01:36, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  RAID defragmentation 

message: The animation showing coloured blocks being shuffled is helpful but without a pause and short blurb below the graphic describing whats going on the viewer isn't really aware of the separate steps going on.
Suggested approach:
"We start with an empty system and fill it up.."
<opening animation>
"Then some items get removed and new ones fill in the empty spaces
<animation>
"The system is now fragmented, portions of some items are scattered. Now we start the defrag process..."
<closing animation>
--Hooperbloob (talk) 05:08, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Animation improvements

message: The page is too focused on only file fragmentation.  It misses memory fragmentation for instance.
Much of the information can be combined with this page.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Semanticrecord (talk • contribs) 01:49, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page is too focused on file fragmentation. 

message: Can defragmenting too much (or too often) be detrimental to the hard drive by wearing it out and making it run too hot?  One defrag app, DiskTune actually stops defragmenting if the temperature of the hard drive gets too high. If defragmenting too much/too often is harmful to the health of the hard drive, the article should mention it. MetalFusion81 (talk) 18:13, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Defragmenting and hard drive stress 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This line: "...Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, the tool has been greatly improved and was given a new interface with no visual diskmap and is no longer part of Computer Management."
I feel that it's actually making a judgment on the efficiency and the quality of the the mentioned OS'. The statement might very well be true, but it's sounds more like a soundbite and less than something descriptive.
I'm pretty sure there are similar statements regarding other OS:s in the article if the above line is in it. I do however feel that this is something that I don't want to go through with myself as I probably would need to brush up on the relevant Wikipedia Guideline Docs. Sadly I've got no time for that at the moment which is why this message will do for now. I rather not do something rash and have someone clean up my mess.
But to quickly relate to what I know better. Articles regarding bands or album releases have both informational sections and a 'reception' section. I think that this particular section in the above mentioned line: "Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, the tool has been greatly improved" sounds like a quote from a review or an advertisement. Not something that's written for educational/informational purposes.
So a couple of quick proposals/suggestions (for the purpose of community feedback):
#At a bare minimum keep the line as it is and just cut out "greatly", I'd say that would make it more neutral.
# 
#Somewhat better: Rewrite the whole part, tersely explain how it was improved and the qualitative implications of it. Why it made it file-system format more efficient.
# 
#What I feel would be a best case scenario: Basically do what's said at '2.' but more in-depth. After that explain too technical parts so someone like your grandma could get the gist of it even if some of it is, short but necessary, technobabble. I think it's feasible to do that in ~1000 characters if you'd provide proper sources
.
At the end of the day computing is for everyone in our modern world. Let's help people understand that world. I don't think we should assume the PR-departments does a good job of doing that.
''
(If anything of the above sound nonchalant or something I just want to mention that I'm tired, not angry and I'm not telling people to do stuff. I'm asking for input. If you feel like it sounds like me being rude I apologize in advance.)
Signing of,
Kxxvii (talk) 20:42, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neutral point of view regarding tools and stuff. 

message: Previously in the article, there was a section about optimisation (optimization). Besides defragmenting, a defrag utility could place the defragmented program files and dependencies next to each other — in their same loading order. For example, if program A loads A.exe, A1.dll, A2.dll, A1.dat and so on, Windows records their loading sequence and stores this data in layout.ini I believe? The defrag tool can use the data from layout.ini to place the program files and dependencies next to each other in their same loading order (after defragmenting them files).
Also mentioned previously: the outer tracks of the hard drive are faster. The most used files can be defragmented, optimised (as above) and also placed onto the outer tracks to improve performance.
Defrag tools can do more than just defragment files. They can optimise performance, as explained above. Why not include this in the article again, along with citations? 
Yes I'm aware that Windows XP and above use prefetcher and later versions of Windows (Vista onwards) also use superfetch to make programs start faster. It may be worth mentioning them in the article? MetalFusion81 (talk) 18:12, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section missing for some reason?