My defragging time will outlast mankind

[Soundwhiz]

Hello

I am, as we speak, defragging my average middle of the road 160 gb Seagate HD under WinXP SP2 and it is consuming my life (with a touch of exaggeration). I started it last night before I hit the sack and now, thirteen hours and twenty minutes later, it has defragged 43 %. I am doing it with the standard defrag utility that ships with Windows, and I'm in safe mode with all non-required processes not running. I am almost hoping readers of this thread are laughing wherever they may be. Please, can you tell me if I'm doing something wrong? How long should it take?

Regards
Kristofer, Estonia

[Captain America]

Why Safe Mode?

I've never had the Windows Defrag Utility take more than 10 minutes?

How much free space do you have? The Defrag Utility requires a certain
amount of free space to move files around properly.

[Leadraft]

Yeah, that's way too long, so somethings not right. I have a 160 and it takes about 2 hours but the length of time depends on a few factors:

1) How often you defrag. I do it about every 3 months or so.
2) Size of the drive
3) How much data is on the drive
4) and of course, how fragmented it is (refer to item 1)

I don't think running it in safe mode or turning off processes makes any difference. I've never done that.

[Soundwhiz]

The hard drive is about 80 % full of stuff. I thought it was good practice to to it in safe mode. I defrag way too little. About three times a year/installation.

[Captain America]

The hard drive is about 80 % full of stuff. I thought it was good practice to to it in safe mode. I defrag way too little. About three times a year/installation.

That might be your problem. I think the Defrag Utility needs about 15% free space to
operate. 80% full puts you right up at the limit.

I'm a Defragging fanatic, I do it at least once a week or whenever I add or delete anything.
I also have nothing on my hard drive not associated with FSX. I only have 6 add-on
aircraft. My hard drive is less than 50% full so my defrag time is very short.

Try deleting any unnecessary stuff and see if that helps.
I don't think you need to do it in Safe Mode?

[xxmikexx]

Soundwhiz,

It's perfectly okay to run the defragger in normal user mode. In fact, you can do other application work while the defragger is running. (But if you run FS you may find it to be very jerky while the defragger is running.)

When the defragger has run to completion, run it once or twice more. Those additional runs should take much less time than the first one did.

Poke around in this forum on the subject of defraggers. If the built-in defragger does everything you want then you're done. If not, you may want to acquire one or more third party defraggers.

[Soundwhiz]

Thanks for the replies. I will uninstall as much as I can and do defrag more often.

[ED_4]

That is what happens if you never defrag your drive for like forever. It will indeed take hours maybe even more if you don't have much space. For me, like some, I always defrag within a month's time. And for the OS drive even as much as within a week or two.

[jimmymac]

FYI, a very good 3'rd party defragger is Perfectdisk 2008. You can use it free for 30 days. It also will clean out duplicate files which can add to a lot of clutter on your drive. And as another person said, run it at least three times for the first time. This takes time, but it won't be 13+ hours. Once all of this is done, then defrag at least once a week. There are a several good defraggers out there, and this is my personal prefrernce.

[angels355]

Soundwhiz,

Defrag in safe mode, for two reasons, firstly defragging in safe mode gives you more complete defrags. With all the other programs turned off there's nothing to interfere with the defrag mode. I've even defragged using the command prompt, c: prompt, although I understand that can be a little risky I understand with regards to the video settings, but it didn't effect my computer when I did it a couple times, but I don't think I'd recommend it. Any way, you DO get more complete defrags defragging in safemode, and it is more efficient.

Secondly, guess what happens when you go into safe mode with regards to amount of free hard drive space to use for defragging the hdd? It goes up! And sometimes when you're at the borderline like that that can make a critical difference. That's what I said, your free space goes up, check it out and compare! The difference is the amount of hdd space required for page files to support all those programs running.

I've never defragged that large of a hdd w/ that much data, I just got a 160, 150, 120, 100, but they're all blank so I guess i'll find out later how bad they can be to defrag.

I'd say there are two main issues in your defrag time, first, amount of data, secondly how fragmented your hdd is. The first defrag takes the longest, you just have to be patient. After the first one the next two or three will go faster. If your hdd is very well defragged it won't take very long at all. When you do your defrags read the reports and see the % of defragmentation, keep an eye on those numbers they will give you an idea of how good or bad the fragmentation is.

I think the default defrag program in xp was provided by Diskeeper? I tried out Diskeeper and was amazed by it, but I just stayed with the default defragmenters. If you defrag often, you'll keep your computer healthy. And like the Diskeeper program tells you, if you allow the hdd to become too fragmented it can actually effect the stability of Windows!

With regards to payware defragmenters, I just stick with the default one, however getting really sophisticated is not objectionable as long as you know what you're doing, and study up on the different defrag programs. I don't think you can go far wrong with Diskeeper. And, I had my blueberry pills this morning so there's a slight chance I might have this name right: The O & O Defragmenter?? I read posts describing that as the ultimate defragger as you can tell it to place the most crucial files I think they said on the outer rim of the hdd which will give you a lot faster response time, and the less necessary files on the inner portion of the hdd. One person however had a serious issue with the O & O because he stopped or he turned off the computer right in the middle of defragmenting. Any way you cut it, I think it can be seriously dangerous to simply turn off the computer in the middle of any type of defrag. So I'd just be careful.

So, I'd say, defrag often, and even multiple times if necessary. The reason, greater Windows system stability, that should also transfer over to greater stability to flight simulator. And secondly greater performance. Ram is cheap, however defragmenting is even cheaper! You can boost your performance and stability by simply defragmenting often. I was telling one Geeky person that I've defragged as often as every week, he objected to that and said that only once per month is good enough. But that's only because HE'S NOT A MANIAC FLIGHT SIMMER!! IT'S NOT JUST A HOBBY IT'S AN ADVENTURE!! So don't listen to Geeks like that, they don't know what they're talking about!

And definitely reduce the size of data on your hard drive. That is really important. When you start to get over filled with data, guess what can happen, parts of windows can get erased, it happened on one of my computers, don't know exactly what was lost.

And run chkdisk to keep your hdd and system healthy. Start, My computer,right click Hard drive c (and/or d, e, etc), Properties, Tools tab, and "Check disk for errors", select both box options. Normally it has you run the program on the next start up because it needs greater system resources.

Good luck, and reduce the amount of data on your hdd.