Defraggler Defragments Individual Files
Amabella Tevebaugh
Most users of defraggler use the first one and defragment files rather than defragging the whole disc.
With todays terrabyte drives defragmenting a whole disk just takes too long whatever defragmenter you use.
(If it's quick then it's skipping things and not telling you it has).
Open Defraggler and analyze, when it's done that click on View Files, tick all the files (there's a box at the top of the list) and then click Defrag Checked.
That defragments each file without bothering about the rest of the empty disc space.
I agree with this. I said a few years ago that Defraggler was way too slow for a HDD defrag. You need to leave it running overnight and set the auto "shutdown after completion" option. If you compare it with other programs they defrag so much quicker and I haven't had any problems with them.
Just found this discussion after a finding Defraggler to be *very* slow. It also hammers the processor, shown by the processor fan frequently kicking in at high speed and always running it at a moderate speed. Difficult to see how, once the analysis of the drive has been done, it can take all that power to issue read and write instructions.
Speed of defragmenting depends on quite a few things, including the total size of the drive, the free space available for the defragmenter to work with, and just what type of 'Defragment' you are doing.
As said above there are different types of 'Drefragment' see the link below for more information.
The larger drives available for home use these days means that of course they are going to take longer to do a full disc defrag (consolidation), the solution is to do a file defrag instead.
With larger drives you are unlikely to be running out of free space, so what you want from a defrag is different to consolidating files to free up space.
See this for more information on the different types of 'Defragment' that Defraggler can do, and how to specify each or a combination:
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Norton had this back in the early 2000s. This is really handy to move your frequently used files to the beginning of the drive. It's not logical (to me) to have the ability to move files to the end of the drive, but not to the beginning. Also, many other third party defragment tools including Windows actually "consolidate" files versus just fragment
I do find the option to move files to the end of the drive, particularly large files and particularly since we can configure the minimum file size to move to the end. It is also handy that we can click on an individual sector and move individual files or chunks to the end. But it would be even handier if we had another option to move files to the beginning of the drive or to the free space closest to the beginning.
I think since defraggler doesn't "consolidate" files, only defrag them, moving frequently used files to the beginning of the drive is extremely important now more than ever. However, since SSD manufacturers don't recommend defragmenting their hard drives, I can see why the feature isn't available now. But, I believe it should've been made available long ago.
Defrag Freespace will consolidate the files into the lowest number of clusters it can without fragmenting them.
Defrag Freespace (allow fragmentation) will consolidate the files even tighter, if it can, by allowing some files to be split (fragmented) over clusters.
Think of your drive clusters like a row of buckets, any random 4 of which are 3/4 full of different colored sands (4 different, unfragmented, files).
You tip that sand into 4 buckets next to each other. That's four files which are now consolidated and not fragmented.
You then take the 4th bucket and spread it's sand on top of each of the first 3 buckets.
You now have an extra empty bucket (free cluster), because you have split up (fragmented) the 4th bucket of sand (the file) into the first 3 buckets (clusters) to fill them up.
PS. None of that necessarily means the files will be at the begining or end of the drive, just that they are packed in (consolidated) to give the free space available showing as a 'block'.
None of this is magically creating any extra free space on the drive, it's just moving things about so that you see them differently.
The only way to free up extra space on a disc is to delete the files that are taking that space up.
TBH it doesn't really matter where on the disc your files are, as long as they are not too fragmented their actual physical position on a HDD will only make a difference of nano-seconds in the computer reading them.
It's just 'nice' to see them all together, and 'nicer' if they are at one end or the other. It's a human perception, the computer isn't bothered by it at all.
Look for the now discontinued freeware defrag tool called JkDefrag (for a known safe source you could use the files included with JkDefrag Portable from PortableApps.com but not the GUI itself since it won't do what is needed), should still work with Win10 systems. JkDefrag has a commandline option that will force all files together at the beginning of the drive so that you can shrink or partition the drive. Note that doing so will fragment the drive, and also note not all files can necessarily be moved - so make sure you have a disk image backup before messing around with the drive.
To move everything to the beginning or to the end of a partition, I can recommend using [MyDefrag]. This thing also has a GUI, and you simply click on what you'd like to do. - Like for our use case "Move files to the beginning of disk".
Reviewing our databases, we find 31% of our indexes have index fragmentation above 30% and should be rebuilt. Yesterday, I found fragmentation of the disk on our SQL Server 2005 system to be at 64%. There are apparently good reasons for our queries to be failing.
Last night, I stopped the SQL Server and started the Windows defrag tool. Of 273GB, 24% was free and the defrag tool ran for three hours. When it completed, a message came up saying not all files could be defragmented and that the new fragmentation level was 55%.
I brought the SQL Server back up. All but one web application worked properly, so I cycled the IIS web server and all was fine again. In the end, it didn't seem that much was accomplished, but I'm thinking I need to defrag the physical disk before trying to rebuild the indexes.
I would sort out sql server fragmentation & maybe look at Trunacting your logs, MDF files before physically fragmenting your drive. There is an argument whther or not to truncate yoour ldf files & mdf files so research this yourself first to see what suite you.
I know at a previous job they used some other tool than the one that comes with Windows to defrag our file and print servers (about 2 TB worth of storage each), I can't remember what the name of it was though.
I have run the normal Windows defrag tool on our non-production servers while SQL is running. The disks defrag OK, and SQL is not harmed - this is the result that should be expected. Even though it should be safe, I would not want to defrag disks in Production while SQL is running.
Running the defrag tool multiple times can give improved results. In order to defrag a file, the tool needs a contiguous chunk of disk space to hold the entire file. Multiple runs of the tool can move defragmented files located all over the disk to nearer the start of the disk, leaving larger chunks of contiguous space to defrag larger files.
Mimimising your log file size before a defrag will speed up the process as there is less data to move around. Remember to reset the log size after the defrag. (OK, this will give you a slightly fragmented log file, but the alternative may be almost nothing gets defragged due to lack of contiguous disk space...)
There must be third-party tools that can defragment faster than the default Windows tool. Also, if you have your disk formatted into 64k segments to optimise SQL performance, then the standard Windows tool will not work. Budget restrictions where I work mean we have not tried anything other than the Windows tool.
The MDF's and LDF' s should not be in use when the SQL server service is stopped. I agree that you should defrag physical files in addition to the indexes (it's no good if your indexes are logically contiguous, but physically all over on the disk)
I recently evaluated and decided to use Diskeeper. The basic server version isn't very expensive. I think I got 10 server licenses for around $2000. It works great with SQL in that it does defragging of the mdf's and ldf's while SQL is online. I have it continously defragging in non production hours.
First I like to agree with Andrew. Defragging the datafiles will improve performance only in very few cases. I had to deal once with a database file which consisted of more than 2000 files. After defragging query performance improved between 10 and 20%. But this case was extreme and in most cases performance improvement will be neglible.
If you still like to defrag your files I suggest using contig.exe from Sysinternals (now taken over by MS). What I liked best about this tool, besides the fact that is free, is the possibility to analyse and defrag individual files instead of the whole volume.
What is the situation with defragmenting audio drives? I don't generally use long streams of audio for multitrack recording, preferring to drop samples into my sequencer (if you see what I mean). I'm sure that defragging would speed up audio access, but I want to make sure before I attempt anything.
Martin Walker replies: All hard drives get fragmented, simply because we all have occasion to delete files. Once there is a gap in the drive where a file used to be stored, the next time you save any file it may use this gap to store part of its data, and then store the remainder in another empty part of the drive. In time, the contents of the drive can therefore become extremely 'fragmented', and individual files may end up split into small chunks scattered about on the disk. It can take noticeably longer to read and write files on a badly fragmented drive, simply because the read/write heads have to jump about between the individual fragments, rather than smoothly moving through a single contiguous file.
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