Defragmentation

I was wondering which way would be better. If you lets say are doing alot of moving things around like clean install of the os and tons of apps is it better to defrag after every install or install everything then defrag once.

The reason I am asking is because I notice sometimes when I make drastic changes like recently I uninstalled a few big apps that each was 5-15gb and reinstalled some of similar size then defragged I noticed even after the prosses I still had 15% of my drive fragmented. Now I am wondering if it is because so much was installed that its not possible to fit all the chunks together because of the already somehwat created structure because of some data that can not be moved or maybe there is another reason? Fill me in.

I use O&O Defrag 2000

Pf.Farnsworth said:

I was wondering which way would be better. If you lets say are doing alot of moving things around like clean install of the os and tons of apps is it better to defrag after every install or install everything then defrag once.

The reason I am asking is because I notice sometimes when I make drastic changes like recently I uninstalled a few big apps that each was 5-15gb and reinstalled some of similar size then defragged I noticed even after the prosses I still had 15% of my drive fragmented. Now I am wondering if it is because so much was installed that its not possible to fit all the chunks together because of the already somehwat created structure because of some data that can not be moved or maybe there is another reason? Fill me in.

I use O&O Defrag 2000

Click to expand...

The best way would be to first, remove the large apps, then defrag. Then add any large apps you have to add back on.

The reason is that it allows your disk to defrag with the maximum amount of free space. Which gives it the maximum amount of contiguous files on the disk, which allows the HD controller to pre-load the next probable data you will need, with the very least amount of head movement.

You should neither defrag after every install nor after several installs. That doesn't matter!

You need to ONLY think about the number of continguous sectors that are available for the disk to use for the same program.

ONLY defrag when the disk is heavily fragmented. If you lose power anytime during a disk defrag, you risk losing/corrupting a lot of data or code. Ditto if your HD should develop an unrecoverable error for some reason.

Hope that helps.

Adak

thanks.

You say to defrag after removing large files/apps but do not mention it when adding. However after a fresh install of say the os I notice it is fragmented pretty badly, and thats on a clean drive, so from observations it seems to make sence to defreag after installing big apps as well to get all the sectors used byt he app together. Am I wrong?

Adak said:

The best way would be to first, remove the large apps, then defrag. Then add any large apps you have to add back on.

The reason is that it allows your disk to defrag with the maximum amount of free space. Which gives it the maximum amount of contiguous files on the disk, which allows the HD controller to pre-load the next probable data you will need, with the very least amount of head movement.

Adak

Click to expand...

I agree totally with this. The one thing I would add is if your installing Windows with it's sloppy file system and temp files, I always defrag after installing XP and the fifty updates from M$.

sorry dual post.