Defrag Options

[Catherin Bergan]

Iam looking at the command line options for defrag.exe as well as the "ScheduledDefrag" task on Windows Server 2012, and I don't understand some of the arguments. In particular, when I view defrag /? I see:

-ReTrimGenerates TRIM and Unmap hints for all currently unused sectors of the volume, notifying the underlying storage that the sectors are no longer needed and can be purged. This can recover unused capacity on thinly provisioned drives.

So, I have a file with 24% fragmentation and quite a few freespace clusters on a 4TB drive. Is it best to run a freespace defrag first, after or even both? I've noticed that it still tends to leave some holes, I assume because there aren't any later files small enough to fill them. Normally I just manually defrag large files that have a lot of fragments then run a quick defrag but that seems to make the freespace gaps worse.

1.) Right-click and open the Command Prompt as Administrator and run "sfc /scannow". If it reports there are no missing/corrupted system files***, close the Command Prompt, go into your settings for system recovery (Control Panel>All>Recovery>Configure System Restore>Configure) and delete all of your system restore points.

3.) Go into your settings for Virtual Memory (Control Panel>All>System>Advanced System Settings>Advanced tab>Performance>Settings>Advanced tab>Virtual Memory) and select "No paging file". After doing this, you will be prompted to reboot. This will delete the system file (pagefie.sys) that's used for swapping memory to disk.

5.) Once you get your files arranged the way you want them, open the Command Prompt as Administrator and enter "powerconfig /hibernate on". Then go back into your settings for virtual memory and select "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives". This will re-create both hiberfil.sys and pagefie.sys on the disk. Then go back into your settings for recovery and create a new system restore point.

Volumes the file system marked as dirty, indicating possible corruption.

You must run chkdsk before you can defragment this volume or drive. You can determine if a volume is dirty by using the fsutil dirty command.

To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer, or you must have been delegated the appropriate authority. If the computer is joined to a domain, members of the Domain Admins group might be able to perform this procedure. As a security best practice, consider using Run As to perform this procedure.

A volume must have at least 15% free space for defrag to completely and adequately defragment it. defrag uses this space as a sorting area for file fragments. If a volume has less than 15% free space, defrag will only partially defragment it. To increase the free space on a volume, delete unneeded files or move them to another disk.

While defrag is analyzing and defragmenting a volume, it displays a blinking cursor. When defrag is finished analyzing and defragmenting the volume, it displays the analysis report, the defragmentation report, or both reports, and then exits to the command prompt.

Running the defrag command and Disk defragmenter are mutually exclusive. If you're using Disk defragmenter to defragment a volume and you run the defrag command at a command-line, the defrag command fails. Conversely, if you run the defrag command and open Disk defragmenter, the defragmentation options in Disk defragmenter are unavailable.

The defragmentation process runs scheduled task as a maintenance task, which typically runs every week. As an Administrator, you can change how often the task runs by using the Optimize Drives app.

Traditional optimization processes. Includes traditional defragmentation, for example moving files to make them reasonably contiguous and retrim. This is done once per month. However, if both traditional defragmentation and retrim are skipped, then analysis isn't run. Changing the frequency of the scheduled task doesn't affect the once per month cadence for the SSDs.

Defrag Command line switches in WindowsTo begin, open an elevated command prompt window.Type Defrag /? or defrag.exe and hit Enter. This will show you all the defragmentation options and command-line switches.Here is the list of Defrag switches:

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I have a solid state drive. I use Smart Defrag on it which shows me that when I defrag it calls it Trim instead of course. I have Optimize turned off on my hard drive because I use Smart Defrag instead. At least I think I have it turned off. I did a check in dos to see what it says about my Trim being disable or enabled. These are my results:

Should I then go into Windows defrag and disable it? You didn't say. So that is in: Hard Drive>>Tools>>Optimize>>This is where I would turn off the defrag or optimize. So, turn it off because I am using Smart Defrag?

Well it shows Hard Drive NTFS at the top of the graphic but within the graphic is says SSD. So I suppose I don't have to do anything to that because there are no settings to change it. And it does say Trim below that graphic. OK, thanks. I always did turn off my Windows Defrag once I downloaded and started to use Smart Defrag on all my Windows though. Ok, thanks again.

I configured the Windows 7 disk defrag utility to run on the 1st of the month at 1:00 AM. The associated task gets created in the Task Scheduler and all is well until the next time I reboot my computer. Once I try to go into Task Scheduler after a reboot, I get the following message:

After clicking OK and browsing through the folders under Task Scheduler Library to try and narrow which task is corrupt, I always get the same message when opening Microsoft > Windows > Defrag. After clicking OK again, I can see the content of the folder is empty.

It seems as though the task is getting deleted, but some sort of pointer or reference to the task is still existing (causing the error to be thrown). I've had this behavior happen on three separate machines all running Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 with all available updates installed.

Thanks for the recommendation! It looks like the issue only occurs when scheduling a monthly defrag ... a weekly task's integrity is still in tact after a reboot. I think I'm going to chalk this up as a bug. I've installed Defraggler though and will try it out as my system defrag.

When looking for a solution to your problem, I stumbled upon this TechNet forums thread in which John Cena suggests checking the state of the features mentioned above (disk defragmentation, Superfetch, Prefetcher and ReadyBoost features). To do so you will need to navigate to the following registry path:

If the superfetch and prefetch features are disabled, their registry values should be 0. If the value is 3 for the Prefetch parameter that would indicate that prefetching is enabled for application launch and boot. If this is the case you will want to check if the SSD has been properly detected. To do so you will want to perform the following steps:

If the disk is missing from the list, then it has been detected as an SSD and will not be automatically defragmented. In that case, you can try to modify the registry to disable the Superfetch, Prefetcher functions.

Ok mine was kind of recognized. The trim feature was turned on but the prefetch and superfetch were also turned on. I verified the trim feature with fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify and looked at the registry settings for the fetching stuff. I thought Windows would disable all of the defrag options and not even let you do it but evidently it will still let you defrag an SSD.

I performed a manual defrag (express) and obtained a green bar in the status page. I activated autodefrag, but after a few weeks the status bar shows only medium optimization (red bar). Why is this? Autodefrag should be keeping the disk defragmented on an ongoing basis eliminating the need for repeat manual or scheduled defrag runs which tend to be very time-consuming.

3.Manual defrag- Comprehensive about every 3-4 weeks ( depends on what you do with your computer). This will optimize disc (re-locate files for best operation). Your disc is always changing, so this will help keep things in best order.

That being said, there hasn't been any real feature development for e4defrag in quite some time. There has been some discussion about what the kernel APIs might be to support this feature, but there has never been a finalized API proposal, let alone an implementation.

Hi, I bought a hard drive and formatted it to Btrfs in order to make it a NAS server.

Btrfs has this nice feature to automatically defrag the hard drive, and it can be turned on in the mounting option.

(See #2 in -to-tune-btrfs-filesystem-for-better-performance/)

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