Defragging hard drive takes too long-what to do?

[smoothrunes]

So I recently decided to get around to defragging my current HDD for the first time, and to my shock, found that a whopping 408 gigs of fragmented files are on my computer. Doesn't take an expert to know that is way too much, so I used defraggler and left the comp on overnight to run the full defragmentation, only to wake up after 9 or so hours and find it had only managed 1% of progress.Now if we take that as an average, and assume a percentage goes up every 9ish hours, I'm looking at nearly 900 hours for the thing to finish, so obviously I cancelled it, not wanting to leave the comp on and idle for such a ridiculous amount of time.

Now I'm left wondering what to do. I'd really like to get the drive cleared up and having to leave the computer on and idle for well over a month seems like a REALLY silly idea.

 

[snurp85]

I mean, i use to just use windows defrag and it worked fine. It does take a long time, especially for large drives. I will say that it is slowest at the beginning. you will notice large increases in completeness. For whatever reason it doesnt linearly advance. Given that you have such a large drive that is clearly very fragmented, i would not be surprised if it took a couple days, especially if you have tons of tiny files.

 

[dumb_man]

Try to move some files / folders from the fragmented drive onto some other drive. Start the defrag only when you have a minimum of 15 - 20% drive space free. Else it will take a huge amount of time to defrag.

 

[smoothrunes]

I mean, i use to just use windows defrag and it worked fine. It does take a long time, especially for large drives. I will say that it is slowest at the beginning. you will notice large increases in completeness. For whatever reason it doesnt linearly advance. Given that you have such a large drive that is clearly very fragmented, i would not be surprised if it took a couple days, especially if you have tons of tiny files.

Ooof, a few days is still pretty brutal. Maybe I'll try the Windows defrag some time. I gotta ask, is the defrag even worth it? I've been having a few issues lately but believe they are unrelated to my HDD anyway, but figured maybe a defrag would help especially after seeing an entire quarter of the drive is fragmented at this point.

 

[snurp85]

i mean, it will speed things up a bit. and if i remember correctly, will identify any bad sectors. It is worth doing as part of standard computer maintenance, just as you would periodic virus and malware scans, and general things like ccleaner.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Several hundred hours sounds about right for 408GB worth of fragmentation. Defrag doesn't work by magic, that 408GB will be moved around multiple times in the process and the speed is constrained by the storage media and interface. As advised above you should be defragging much more often, and on a disk with no less than 20% free space or all that will happen is data will be moved from block to block for hours at a time with no improvement.

It would actually be much faster in this case to simply acquire a second drive of sufficient size and, assuming this isn't the system drive, do a file copy from one to the other, then replace the fragmented drive with the fresh one. If this is the system drive then a clone process would be used.

 

[snurp85]

Several hundred hours sounds about right for 408GB worth of fragmentation. Defrag doesn't work by magic, that 408GB will be moved around multiple times in the process and the speed is constrained by the storage media and interface. As advised above you should be defragging much more often, and on a disk with no less than 20% free space or all that will happen is data will be moved from block to block for hours at a time with no improvement.

It would actually be much faster in this case to simply acquire a second drive of sufficient size and, assuming this isn't the system drive, do a file copy from one to the other, then replace the fragmented drive with the fresh one. If this is the system drive then a clone process would be used.

To that end, if you copy everything to a SSD, it becomes irrelevant

 

[CostaP]

Hi,

I was in the exact same position. About 400,000 fragmented files. And it would be like 1% after half a day, maybe 3% if I was lucky. The quickest solution:

-Go to 'File List', select 'Fragments' so it views/displays the biggest fragmented files from high to low.
-Then you can select e.g 20% of files (shift-leftclick+shift) and click 'Defrag Highlighted' and let it defrag
-Now maybe be careful with the file 'type'. Not sure if this matters, but if you defrag an 'Application' file type, it might be important for the OS that gets moved around.

-What I did was select the same file 'type' and click 'Defrag Highlighted'. And I do the easy file types, e.g images files like PNG, JPEG, Word doc file type, WinRar file type etc. This will gradually bring it down a LOT.
-What made a huge duifference was, in the 'Search' tab, type in e.g Steam, or a certain game name. It will bring up fragmented files with that name in. And for me, I think 'Rome 2' had LOTS of fragmented files. So I just dragmented all the files that had 'Rome 2' and it reduced from 20% fragmented to 17% in one defrag of those 'Rome 2' files.

Keep doing it until it goes low. Then you can even just normally defrag, but it will still take long. I have it at like 13% fragmented. But I am going to flash (update) my BIOS, and reinstall Windows onto a new SSD, and then (after backing up) wipe my HDD and just add the photos, documents, projects back on there.

Hope this helps, any questions feel free to ask!

 

[smoothrunes]

Hi,

I was in the exact same position. About 400,000 fragmented files. And it would be like 1% after half a day, maybe 3% if I was lucky. The quickest solution:

-Go to 'File List', select 'Fragments' so it views/displays the biggest fragmented files from high to low.
-Then you can select e.g 20% of files (shift-leftclick+shift) and click 'Defrag Highlighted' and let it defrag
-Now maybe be careful with the file 'type'. Not sure if this matters, but if you defrag an 'Application' file type, it might be important for the OS that gets moved around.

-What I did was select the same file 'type' and click 'Defrag Highlighted'. And I do the easy file types, e.g images files like PNG, JPEG, Word doc file type, WinRar file type etc. This will gradually bring it down a LOT.
-What made a huge duifference was, in the 'Search' tab, type in e.g Steam, or a certain game name. It will bring up fragmented files with that name in. And for me, I think 'Rome 2' had LOTS of fragmented files. So I just dragmented all the files that had 'Rome 2' and it reduced from 20% fragmented to 17% in one defrag of those 'Rome 2' files.

Keep doing it until it goes low. Then you can even just normally defrag, but it will still take long. I have it at like 13% fragmented. But I am going to flash (update) my BIOS, and reinstall Windows onto a new SSD, and then (after backing up) wipe my HDD and just add the photos, documents, projects back on there.

Hope this helps, any questions feel free to ask!

Hmm, this could prove useful, thanks. Do you know if there's a way to defrag specific folders. Wouldn't mind it running through my entire steam folder and seeing how much it can take it down by.

 

[CostaP]

Think only way is to just type in 'Steam' in the 'search' tab. Dont think you can do folders

 

[RolandJS]

I may be wrong, somewhere I read that making a full image of a partition onto an external device, then restoring said image back onto the original internal drive provides an almost 90-100% defragged set of files, whether OS, data, whatever. To reduce Milo Murphy Law, I make a C partition and a D partition backup onto two external hard-drives.