Defrag D Drive

[Matilda Equiluz]

Harddisk drives fragment data because they are random by nature. Consisting of an actuator, platter, spindle, actuator arm, and read/write head (among other parts), hard drives work by storing and seeking out information on a rotating disk.

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You have full control over which drives, folders and files you defrag. Or simply use the default settings and let Defraggler do the work for you. Simple enough for every day users and flexible enough for advanced users.

Defragmentation reverses the process your computer uses to break up data when it saves files to your hard drive. Defragging reformats your drive, reconstituting the files that were fragmented when they were written (saved) to your disk.

Hard disk access is a highly mechanical process, even though so many other computer components are purely digital. And disk access is the slowest part of computing. It can typically take 5-15 milliseconds for your computer to access the bits and bytes on a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), whereas accessing data on a modern solid state disk (SSD) or in RAM is done in a fraction of a millisecond.

Aside from the time it takes to access files, the overall throughput of hard disks is also low. Typical HDD speeds are 100 MB/sec for larger files and 0.5-1 MB for small file fragments (which are more common in day-to-day operations). Check out our detailed guide to learn more about the differences between SSDs and HDDs.

Imagine you clean up your computer by deleting five GB of data from your hard disk, leaving a five-GB gap in the middle of space otherwise occupied by Windows, your applications, and data files. The next day, you download the next hot game, which may be about 20 GB. Your hard disk stores the first five GB of the game in that gap you recently freed up, and it breaks up the remaining 15 GBs into fragments and stores them into other free spaces or slots them at the end of the occupied disk space.

Now your new game is split up, or fragmented, into two or more pieces. The read/write head of your mechanical hard disk now has to piece together the files for the game when you launch it. Stitching those files together takes more time than it otherwise would if the data were kept in one continuous block of information.

Defragging a traditional hard disk drive is safe and easy, and it keeps your disk healthy. Regular defragmentation and other maintenance tasks help your computer run smoothly, and the risk of damage to your hardware or files is extremely small, even if the process is disrupted mid-flow.

Yes, you can defrag your disk. If you're using IE, though, the file gets put in your temp folder until it's fully downloaded at which point it gets copied to its final destination so you may still be downloading to your hard drive and not to the external disk.

It's certainly a good idea, though, to leave your machine alone while defragging and really best if you can defrag the drive while it's not being used. The c:\ drive of a Windows machine that is in use is constantly being written to which lowers the effectiveness and extends the time required for a defrag. Best to boot to an alternate drive and defrag with no activity.

Defrag is essential since it reports the last sector occupied by data to your Disk Management console, making it possible to shrink the volume up to a certain amount. You can safely defrag right away since, on modern Windows Server OSes, it usually works exceptionally quickly and takes 5 minutes at most, even on huge volumes. Unfortunately, sometimes a pagefile can be located at the end of the disk, making it impossible to move while defragging. As a result, a considerably small amount of shrinkable space is reported to the OS. If that is the case, you will need to reboot the virtual machine, temporarily disabling pagefile, perform the shrink and restore pagefile settings.

Indeed, deduplication is another excellent piece of advice that may save you a considerable amount of space. It does an amazingly great job on regular office files, similar virtual machines, and even Exchange and SQL databases. In order to estimate your potential storage savings without actually enabling deduplication, you can use a small free tool called Deduplication Analyzer Deduplication Analysis Solution from StarWind . Make sure to schedule the deduplication job out of working hours like weekends or nighly since it will significantly impact your performance when running.

It's best to start your own thread rather than tagging on to someone elses', especially if that existing thread is still active.

When you have two people asking questions on the same thread it can get confusing knowing who is answering which person.

The fragmented files themselves seem to be quite large as well, 31 files in 1.3 TB so an average of 42 GB each (I assume they are all MP4 files), and they are in a lot of fragments.

So there is a lot of work to be done to defragment this drive.

The estimate of how long it will take may be about right, but personally I don't take too much notice of those guestimates of how long it will take, they can be out by a long way and suddenly change up or down.

It's the same with anything that shows an estimated time remaining.

You can Stop the defrag and go back to it later, but when you restart it will have to look at the whole drive again and so will probably say about the same 20 hours. it's a gustimate.

If you do want to stop it then do it properly, click the 'Stop' button and then let Defraggler finish what it is currently doing before closing it.

If you force it to close, or crash it, then there can be a lot (GB's) of temporary files left on the disc.

Updates:

I wouldn't worry about updating Defraggler, it hasn't had a function update since 2018 so the one you have now will be up to date.

If you believe that you had a licence key but can't find it now then you can look it up here by entering the email address that you used when buying the licence:

-lookup

I know that there is no point (in fact it is a bad idea) to run Defrag on an SSD. What about a virtual machine running on an SSD, should I defrag it's hard drive since it is basically accessing the Hard Drive the same way?

I use the dynamically-allocated option for VHDs, so they start small and expand as needed. But as the VHD (not necessarily the files) becomes fragmented, it expands to include all of the allocated blocks. Defragging the VHD is the first step to compacting it again.

As you can see, in both cases fragmentation only really becomes an issue at stage of the operation where the physical hard drive tries to read the data, and that happens in the real OS, outside the VM context. Prior to that, everything likely happens in memory.

In conclusion, since we know that SSDs do not suffer from fragmentation in the real OS, and that the issue of fragmentation in a VM probably only occur at the last physical step of the operation, I would guess that defragmenting either your virtual OS or the virtual disk file in your main OS would not improve performance on a SSD, while being as detrimental/useless as defragging your real OS is.

Edit: And if that's correct, it's a damn good reason to put a VM on a SSD! On a HDD, fragmentation at any stage (guest OS, virtual disk file, real OS) will break linearity and cause fragmentation at the physical disk step.

With regards to the original question of a traditional defrag of an SSD, I do agree it is a bad idea, but there are specific solutions available that address the concerns of file movement and SSD lifespan.

A virtual machine that is running Windows as its operating system, fragmentation will still occur and the combined effect of the extra I/O traffic will reduce the speed and efficiency of not only the guest systems, but that of the host as well. Both Microsoft and VMware recommend the need to address fragmentation at the guest level.

The file attributes are examined ($MFT) and if the data is not contained in a single extent (fragment) then additional I/O requests are created for each extent/fragment to satisfy the original data request.

Each Windows virtual machine is sending this type of I/O traffic to the Host system. If the file system structure is fragmented at the Guest/Virtual machine level then this translates into additional and unnecessary I/O traffic having to be handled by the Host and farmed out the backend storage. This gets further compounded as you add more and more virtual machines. In fact, you can have fragmentation within fragmentation at the host file system level.

Whether the data is stored on an SSD or a traditional HDD, if you are running Windows the NTFS file system will become fragmented and as a result you will never achieve the manufactures rated speed and throughput due to NTFS file and free space fragmentation. The effects can be measured via PerfMon by looking at Average Disk Read Queue Length, Average Write Queue Length, and most importantly Split IO/Sec.

This is a prerequisite if you intend to shrink a dynamically-allocated virtual disk. Yet, even if you don't shrink them, de-fragmented virtual machines with zeroed-out free space often produce compressed backups that are smaller.

I recently reduced a virtual machine's compressed backup size from 198.99 GB to 172.96 GB (a 26 Gigabyte reduction in size), using these very techniques and the exact same compression algorithm was used before and after implementing them.

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