Windows Defrag on 11th Pass

[tgorlachov]

I'm not so sure this is normal, but Windows Defrag is on its 11th pass for my HDD which only said it had 7% fragmentation. This has been running for well over an hour so far, and yes, I did hear about options faster than Windows Defrag after looking around.

Edit: It has actually finished after 14 passes. From what I saw, it's usually supposed to be around 7.

 

[CountMike]

It's supposed to make only one pass.

 

[James Mason]

Your HDD may be dying, you should find out sooner rather than later whether it's the case.
https://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html
If it's health isn't good, buy a replacement immediately. It's extremely expensive to try and recover data from a dead drive. (Thousands of dollars)

 

[tgorlachov]

It is showing my drive has good health.
The time I installed this drive is 305 days ago, so it is fairly new, and has 1842 hours of use.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

It's supposed to make only one pass.

A highly fragmented drive, or drive with limited free space takes many more than just one pass. 14 passes isn't unusual at all. Especially if it's a large drive.

 

[tsnor]

Defrag taking a long time likely means your HDD is fairly full. A spinning HDD at 80% or so full slows down because it can't get things contiguous on the drive, and jumping to different spots on the drive is really slow.

Suggest you look at how full your drive is and if full take some action:
1. google "windows disk cleanup" and get rid of old system files. All the system update files just sit there, GB of them
2. buy a large fast HDD and clone your current drive to the new drive. Large is faster for spinning HDD (until you get to extreme sizes) because the drive spin at the same speed, but the recording density is higher. You get more data per second.
3. Consider moving to an SSD (you do not have an SSD or your would not be defragging). SSDs have gotten very cheap. Buy at least a 250 GB drive if you can, they perform better than the smaller drive because they have more dies and can use them in parallel.

Post if you want more info.

 

[tgorlachov]

That makes sense since my drive is almost 50% full. It is using 127 GB of 297 GB.
I would like to get an SSD, but I don't have the money for it right now.

 

[tgorlachov]

I started using the disk cleanup and it has already cleaned 7 GB of windows updates.