[Narutino]

fileholder, on 19 February 2010 - 04:58 AM, said:

I have a 1 terabyte HDD and I haven't done defragment since I bought it last year. Do you think that we don't need defragment with the speed and the space that we have in our hard drives today?

I remember when I had my first computer, it only has 100MB of space. I had to do defragment every week and compress the files that I'm not always using to save space. Today, it seems like defragment is a thing of the past, well this is just me.

Why not? I think defragment is not only applied to get your files saved efficiently in your HDD, but also to make the files easier to access by the system, hence increases the system performance (speed).

[fileholder]

Narutino, on 22 February 2010 - 02:27 PM, said:

Why not? I think defragment is not only applied to get your files saved efficiently in your HDD, but also to make the files easier to access by the system, hence increases the system performance (speed).

I know this already. I don't want to sound rude but that is exactly what defragmentation does, to arrange the files so that the system can access the files more easily.

But my main concern here is the need for doing a defragment. I have a considerable fast computer with 2.7 Ghz processor and 4GB of memory. I'm not sure if the system is fast is or slow when accessing data from my hard drive. Is there are a way to test the speed of accessing data?

[Brian]

Sure, there are all sorts of benchmarking tools. But at the end of the day I'd say the consensus is that for HDD you need to be doing a regular defrag.

[Trinary]

fileholder, on 22 February 2010 - 03:07 PM, said:

I know this already. I don't want to sound rude but that is exactly what defragmentation does, to arrange the files so that the system can access the files more easily.

But my main concern here is the need for doing a defragment. I have a considerable fast computer with 2.7 Ghz processor and 4GB of memory. I'm not sure if the system is fast is or slow when accessing data from my hard drive. Is there are a way to test the speed of accessing data?

Regardless of how fast the rest of the system is, the performance of your storage subsystem is a major (limiting) factor on how well your system will respond to I/O requests.

If you have a mechanical HDD, there is absolutely no question that you will benefit from defragmenting the drive on a regular basis. Even if all you use the drive for is to store media files, you should still defragment on a regular basis to ensure that the free space is regularly consolidated so that when you copy new media files to the drive that they will not immediately be fragmented.

If you have a SSD (and hopefully you have Windows 7 if you do!), you should avoid defragmentation, as the performance gains are probably not worth the decrease in the life of the drive (which just goes with how NAND works). There are also articles available discussing what Windows features should be disabled when using a SSD, but if your SSD drive supports the TRIM command, and you use Windows, you should know that Windows 7 is the only Windows OS that supports TRIM natively.

[fileholder]

I'm still using XP at the moment but I'm planning to move to Windows 7 when the price will go down (I hope). Does TRIM works like the regular defragment program?

Okay, now I'm convinced that I still need to defragment my hard disk even though I feel like it doesn't need it. It's been a while since I did a defragment.

I used to watch the light green blocks changing into blue blocks while the computer is defragmenting my hard disk. Sometimes I would like to see red blocks (bad sectors) for a change. Those were the days!

[Brian]

TRIM is for SSDs. Think of it as intelligent disk management - in Windows 7 and SSD won't become fragmented as a result.