Windows 7 I didn't know that it worked this way...

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I posed a few days ago someplace that I found that defragmenting my C:\ drive gave me a real increase in read speed. From about 3 Mbs to 30.

I defraged my B:\ drive (a partition of C:\) and today I tacked D:\ it was a long haul, mostly because it has the compressed back up of C:\ on it.

I went to the movies and then out to dinner, but when I got home is was finally done.

Here's what I did't expect, the read write speed on my D:\ drive went clear up to 60 Mps.
So I checked my C:\ drive, it had also increased to about 60 Mbs as did my B:\ drive.

It would appear that the one large fragmented file on my B:\ drive was slowing down my whole computer.

I never thought that even one drive could effect the others that much.

Maybe this is something else going on but my computer is running noticeably better all round.

When I get time I think I will update my backups on me external drives and remove the ones on D: so I don't have to deal with it on a day to day basis.

Mike

 

[Joe S]

Mike
It you have a drive with disk images I've read that defrag may corrupt the image. I saw that on the Acronis forum. Copying an image may also cause a problem. It would be a good idea to validate them again.
Joe

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Thanks Joe, I'll do that.

As I said I think that if it effects performance that much I'll stop putting it on D:\ and just do it on 2 of my external drives.

Right now I have a backup (the most up to date) on my D:\ drive and a less often updated one on an external drive.

Mike

 

[OldTimer]

Back in ancient times, we defragmented hard drives by making a file-by-file backup of the entire drive and then doing a restore of the backup. Every file was re-written to the hard drive in file-by-file order with NO spaces between them and of course NO fragmentation.

My Ghost backup followed by a Ghost restore does exactly the same thing. I don't want to blow anyone's mind, but here is a view of my C: drive right after I've done a backup followed immediately by a restore. The GREEN zone at the end of the data is the Pagefile that windows recreated after the restore. I delete it before I do a backup to save space in the Backup Image File.
Link Removed

If you're going to do a Windows Defrag, , , do yourself a favor and delete every junk file on your hard drive first. Why defrag JUNK?
If you don't do a cleanup first, you wind up with the best organized junk in town. rofl

We can't really see all the things Windows does with the other drives on our computers. But it does keep track of the directories of every drive that it can see. Set up a new drive and windows will create a Recycle bin there and also a System Restore file.
So it stands to reason that if any drive is highly fragmented or otherwise messed up, it will affect everything.

To cut down on interactions, I do my backups to a second drive and then unplug that drive when I'm done.

Cheers mates!

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi OldTimer

I have a regular procedure that I run every day.

First I run CCleaner, then I run Malwarebytes, next I run Defraggler, on the Defrag files setting.
It can do this in just a few minutes, and it will let you chose not to defrag things like your compressed backup files.

Once every few months I run Defraggler and do a complete Defrag of both my drives.

Since I posted this I removed my back ups of my C:\ drive from D:\ and I have seen an improvement in performance.

I have the C:\ drive backed up to 2 different external drives anyway.

Because it kept updating the C:\ backup it was on it's way to eating up a lot of the D: drives space.

I set up the new computer for one of my friends a number of years ago, and I installed Ghost on it and set it to update his backup automatically.

Years went by and he called to say he kept getting this error message something about backing up.

I went over to his house and looked at his computer, and the D:\ dive had been completely full of C:\ drive backup files for ages.
I said your D:\ drive is full, and he said what's my D:\ drive?

I formatted it created a new backup and started it over again.

He was surprised how much faster his computer ran.

Later we updated his computer to Windows 7.
I had him get an external drive and created an image of C:\ on it, and showed him how to manually backup just the important stuff to B on a regular basis.

When ever I go over there I start a manual backup of C:\ and D:\ on the external, the rest of the time it's off.

Mike

 

[OldTimer]

Hmmm! That's the problem with automatic backups. You have no control over them. You really don't know if the program has run properly or not.

I do mine manually, from a DOS boot disk, that way I control every aspect of the backup..... how it's named, amount of compression, location of the backup file, etc. No aspect of the backup eludes me. *And, I alternate the location of my backups.
*D: partition, second internal HD, external HD and DVD.
I also run a "Check" of the backup Image File to make sure it's Viable.

The two programs you mentioned, CCleaner and Defraggler are the only two programs I've ever tried that totally destroyed my hard drive. Only a Ghost Restore got me going again. I won't let either of those programs anywhere near my PC.
It's funny, that I NEVER find either of those programs on new customer's PC's.

Another defrag program that left my HD in a complete mess, was Auslogic's Defrag. It had data files scattered from one end of the drive to the other. I wish I'd taken a screen shot of it. Again, I did a Ghost backup + Ghost restore to get it back in order again.

Cheers Mate!

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I've run both Defraggler and CCleaner for many years and they've never cause any problems on any of my computers.

But I've had problems with Ghost on several occasions and finally switched to Acronis.

I guess you just never know what's going to happen, it's the mystery of computerism. LOL

Yesterday we installed Age of Conan on my friends Windows XP computer.
He has run a lot of online games and has both Lord of the Rings Online and Wow running right now.
But we can not get AoC to connect to the authentication sever, we tried for hours with no luck.

On my computers both my present Windows 7 one and my old XP computer I had no problem at all.

You just never know.

Mike