Disk Fragmentation

[outop49]

What is the major cause of disk fragmentation? How often is it necessary to defrag, on average?

 

[Random717]

The fuller your harddrive gets the smaller the empty spaces become. Windows generally tries to copy files into spaces that are as big as the file being copied, but if these aren't available then the file gets split. Ftp transfers and some file managers also just copy files into the first available free space which causes it to split quite a bit.
I defrag every 2 months, or when I'm bored, but I transfer +-30gigs a week via ftp so my drives are always a mess. Occasionally when I burn dvd's and they fail I'll check how fragmented my drive is, and more often then not a couple of the files are sitting in 7000 fragments, so I either copy them to another drive or defrag before burning again..

 

[killadoob]

i defrag my pc everyday at 6:30am

i set it to do everyday to keep my machine running nice and fast

 

[SlickNick]

So taking what xcleric42 said, if you have a hard drive with lots of storage space, and it isn't full, meaning you have a good couple of Gigs free, you won't really need to defrag. Once your drive is close to capacity, and you find that file or application access is slow, then you should defragment your hard drive. A good way to keep ahead of this is by having 2 seperate drives in your PC, one for storing your files on, and one running your applications.

 

[Ratwiz]

I would highly recommend using 3rd party defragmentation software such as Raxco's PerfectDisk (commercial software) for defragging or AusLogic's (free) defragmentation software.

 

[w1z4rd]

I use Diskeeper lite though I am not sure on the practicality of it, but it seems to work fine.

 

[killadoob]

perfectdisk is shyte