doomddom: Do you defragment your computer? - Computers, Math, Science ...

seaweasel
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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 10:49 pm?? ?Post subject:

auntblabby wrote:

on the rare occasions i am very bored, i will watch, slack-jawed with fascination, the little colored boxes rearrange themselves in the big grid.

I build pc's and even I enjoy this activity! Smile

Funny though, the whole idea is to squish all your files as close together as you can so the head has less distance to travel.. in doing so you will read/write more to certain parts of the hard disk causing wear.

But in reality the moving parts will fail way before the disk reaches its read/write limits..

Of course you never want to defrag a solid state drive.. Waste of time and life capacity for it.

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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 10:51 pm?? ?Post subject:

Nup. No need to. I don't run Windows. Unix has been storing files without significant fragmentation for decades. Defragmentation is a Windows problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation#Approach_and_defragmenters_by_file-system_type Compare "NTFS" (Windows) and "Linux ext2, ext3, and ext4" (the most common Linux file systems). Linux avoids fragmenting files, and rarely needs disk defragmentation - I have never bothered. Windows needs regular defragmentation.

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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 11:58 pm?? ?Post subject:

auntblabby wrote:

on the rare occasions i am very bored, i will watch, slack-jawed with fascination, the little colored boxes rearrange themselves in the big grid.

I remember I used to do that with the old win 98 defragger Laughing . It actually showed every single cluster, so it was a really long list.
Then the new ones in XP and Vista were just a colored strip.
Then I found defraggler.

I don't defrag very often, really, the computer apparently does it automatically already. Last time I had to defrag it was to shrink a partition to make a new one and put linux on it, there was some mft stuff in the way and it was hell to find the proper tools.

Got to admire Fnord's discipline, I only run CCleaner monthly, Spybot like every half a year, and Avast only when I suspect I've catched something.

http://ssd-life.com/eng/ssdlife-faq-frequently-asked-questions.html

I think I read newer ones didn't have that problem, or at least it wasn't as pronounced, but I haven't really looked into it yet
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Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 12:02 am?? ?Post subject:

As far as I know, it's the action of the electrons pooling in the substrate in their cells... and they wear down the insulator between pockets eventually. Probably friction.. just very tiny. Same thing can happen to flash drives.. Although it's proper coding now to make sure the software "Write levels" or moves around.. not staying in the same code block for long. That's even important on arduino stuff if you use the built in flash memory. What do I know. It's all amazing is what I gather!