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Disk + File Fragmentation


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Well, I've had my hard drive for about a year already, and I just installed Diskeeper Lite, a program used to defragment hard drives. It says that my file fragmentation is at 70% now. I haven't run it once since I got my hard drive. Will defragmenting make my computer much faster, or is it almost useless?

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Defragmenting is sometimes referred to as Optimization since it reorganizes the files so they're in order. As you use your computer and access the hard disk it tends to throw bits and pieces of files all over the partition. It will speed up the access times for your hard disk.

Make sure you boot into safemode and have 15% of free space before you defragment. With safemode you can defrag the space used for your Swap file and the 15% gives the program enough room to move files around.

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Just my 2 cents.

Most newer hard drives are fast enough that defragmenting them is really not necessary, unless you are using very disk intensive programs like many games, databases, etc. I still defrag (mainly out of habit) my drives based on how heavily I use them like how often i'm deleting files, installing new programs, etc all of which increases the fragmentation of a drive. For my higher use drives I mostly defrag them every two months or so for lower use drives I defrag them around 10 months or so.

To prevent the swap file or page file from fragmenting you can set it to a fixed size. This however requires you to know how big of a page file to set it to, which is mostly a trial and error process.

hope this helps

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If you're going to set it to a fixed size (Which I would recommend as well) the equation is 1.5x(RAM) where (RAM) is the amount of system ram you have. In most cases (at least in my experiences) that should work.

Be warned, Windows isn't meant to have fixed swap file sizes. I've never experienced a problem with this, but then again I'm running 1024MB of ram at this point in time. Some of the other system admins at my school like to set the workstations at 1.5x to 3.0x, and let Windows handle it from there.

But this is getting off topic, if we really want to discuss swap files we should create a new post.

Oh, and apparently Diskeeper can actually defrag the swap file (or so it claims). So you shouldn't have to worry about safe mode. (Although I'm not sure how that works... cleaning up the swap file safely.)

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I use Diskeeper before and after installing all of my games, especially gargantuan installs like Kotor or UT2004. The more often you defrag, the less time it takes to defrag the next time.

Of course I am also a big proponent for formating the HD and reinstalling Windows once or twice a year, like changing the oil in a car. Windows tends to accumulate crap over time.

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