Windows 8.1 and defragging?

[daniel_blacke]

So, I have read a few times that with Windows 8.1 defragging your HDD was a thing of the past. Supposedly it runs it's Optimize Windows every week or so. I gleefully neglected to do my perfunctory download of Piriform's Defraggler 7 months ago when I bought my off-the-shelf Lenovo. http://icecat.us/en/p/lenovo/57323870/pcs-workstations-0888440134321-K450-22300954.html

Time has gone by with downloads of games and oddities and what not, deleted some things, as always. But, it seemed to me that lately my loading screens just aren't as snappy as they used to be...

I was feeling pretty ill last night before I went to bed and on a whim, I downloaded Defraggler. Ran the system Analyzer and it said 11% fragmented: GOOD. Iirc 15% is about when you want to run a defrag.

Then, I ran the benchmark test and got this:

Random Read Speed: 3.48 MB/s

I thought, that sounds atrocious! What kind of a hunk of junk do I have here.=/
So, I ran the Defragment while I slept like I used back on Windows 7, and Windows XP... Low and behold, this morning I ran the Benchmark test again and:

Random Read Speed 69.52 MB/s

Do you think there's some thing wrong with my windows, my HDD or something else or is not Defragging with 8.1 just a myth?

 

[giantbucket]

are those 4k random reads? cuz no HDD has that high of a speed (most HDD have a 4k random read/write of maybe 1MB/s). maybe you were looking at 512k randoms?

anyhoo, i've noticed that while Win8.1 does defrag weekly on all drives, it's not as effective as Defraggler.

 

[daniel_blacke]

Uhm... I don't understand the question. I only know that I used the benchmark tool on Piriform's Degraggler.

Interestingly, I just ran the Benchmark tool again after a long day of gaming and browsing and:

Random Read Speed: 21.39MB/s

 

[giantbucket]

most random read benchmarks use a 4k size for doing the test, to better emulate typical OS file size use. there's also a test using a 512k size, which is (clearly) larger.

on my WD Black, which is a HDD, a 512k random read comes in at around 38MB/s with a write at 54MB/s. on the other hand, the 4k random stats (which are more representative of real world OS use) are coming in at 0.5MB/s read and 1.1MB/s write.

those are typical numbers for HDD. for an SSD, the 512k are 300+, and the 4k are 30+.

for fun and education, look through some results here:
http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/

 

[daniel_blacke]

most random read benchmarks use a 4k size for doing the test, to better emulate typical OS file size use. there's also a test using a 512k size, which is (clearly) larger.

on my WD Black, which is a HDD, a 512k random read comes in at around 38MB/s with a write at 54MB/s. on the other hand, the 4k random stats (which are more representative of real world OS use) are coming in at 0.5MB/s read and 1.1MB/s write.

those are typical numbers for HDD. for an SSD, the 512k are 300+, and the 4k are 30+.

for fun and education, look through some results here:
http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/

Very interesting, thank you for the link.

My results were:
Seq: read 174/s write 156/s
4k: read .74/s write 2.25/s

btw its a WD Blue 1TB


Apparently Piriform is using some configuration of their own and searching the internet yields very little information about it.

 

[giantbucket]

those sound like typical numbers. most people use CrystalDiskMark (software) for the tests. the sequential performance is what everyone advertises since it gives the largest (and thus most impressive) numbers, but the 4k and 4kQD32 (deep queue) are the ones that matter.