"Ashton Crusher" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:14:24 -0400, +Bob+
wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:04:39 -0700, Ashton Crusher
wrote:

I understand your desire to watch colors change on the screen but
the
built in defrager works fine if you use it as defraging is intended
to
be used - as an out of sight/out of mind background task. I set it
up
that way 18 months ago and I have never even noticed it running
since then.

Background defrag is a waste of performance you could be using in
the
foreground. Not to mention, defragging a disk is a moderately risky
operation on the drive. Doing it while foreground tasks are running
is
not very smart.

Well, if you think that's a risk worth worrying about then no one
should ever install any programs on their computer since program
installs trash far more systems then a background defrager ever has.
If you run the built in defrag as it's intended it simply is always
doing little bits of clean up and there is no need for it to take
over
the system like the store bought ones do so that people can look at
the pretty little squares changing colors - been there, did that, am
over it.

Practically speaking, just running a defrag on a set schedule and
preferably when you won't be using it is the best advice. I do that
with my various back-ups and security sweeps.

However, there's more information in these other defrag programs than
watching the lights blink, such as listing files that won't defrag.
When hiberfil.sys came up on a manual defrag of my laptop as a file
that could not be defragged, I deleted it and recovered quite a bit of
space. I had hibernation turned off but didn't realize that it
already had created a whopping useless file. Deleting it also allowed
the defragger to pack more files into the first band of written
clusters. I'm sure the performance increase was trivial, but the
recovered space on a relatively small laptop HD was worth doing.

Seeing the list of undefraggable files also taught me that in order to
squeeze the absolute most out of defragging, shut down every (and I do
mean every) other app before defragging. An open program can put a
hold on auxiliary files it creates while running and the defragger
won't touch them. Again, the effect is small but if you're not using
the computer, why not shut down everything?

Perusing the other undefraggable/unmovable files and the pretty
squares also can be instructive as to what's happening "under the
hood". For example, most writes are done in two bands, one starting
at the beginning of the HD, and another band starting at about the
middle of the drive. This must be a deliberate write strategy.
Otherwise, used clusters would be randomly strewn across the drive.
I've also backtracked undefraggable/unmovable files to one or two
resource-consuming processes that I didn't need and could be
terminated.