Frag this!

Etaqua

Etaqua

Etaqua

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Joined
25 Nov 2005
Posts
478
Recently, my hard drive has needed pretty much constant defragging to avoid problems like this. I'm using the Windows built in defragger at the moment, and that was taken after a defrag yesterday.

Some things you should know:

- I've been doing TONS of torrenting. More than usual because NTL have given me a free 10mb trial for a month.

- My computer hasn't been turned off for four days.

I'd just like to know how it is possible that my hard drive got that fragmented overnight, and what better defragging programs there out there than the bog standard Windows one...

TIA. :)
 
The built in Windows one is actually very decent, it is the core of Diskeeper without the extra's

What Diskeeper allows you to do is schedule defragmenting every day, 2 days etc...

Your harddrive is propably very fragmented because of the torrents as they are downloaded is small parts that are scattered all over the drive.

try defragmenting more often and preferably without any activity on the drive/partition
 
personally i use o&o defrag pro 8, works wonders and if you want you can set it to do a stealth defrag on startup, so it'll trickle away slowly unfrag your hard drive without stealing too many resources

i'm sure disk keeper can do this too
 
Hrm, well I've read several times in here that the Windows one sucks. :p

Before the connection speed increase, my drive didn't get this fragmented, even over weeks without defragging...

Could leaving my computer on 24/7 have anything to do with it?
 
depending on what torrent program your using, u can change the way it downloads chunks. I know you can with Azureus, tbh thats the one you should be using. ITS THE BEST.
 
Etaqua said:
- I've been doing TONS of torrenting.
Click to expand...


theif :p :D your funding terrorists!!!

Osama bin ladin himself owns bootleg copys of the beatles.




back on topic:

to be honest i dont really trust any defragging software as ive seen them go from saying 3% fragmented to 30% at the transfere of a floppy disk, i just defrag individual folder locations, i.e. battlefield 2 folder, ect ect, much quicker than doing the entire drive :) obviously i still do defrag the entire drive but not very often.

you may find some useful tools and tips here

http://www.sysinternals.com/
 
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you can schedule a defrag with windows scheduler and normal windows defrag.
just look at the defrag command and save it in a batch file.
I often run a defrag of my C, Games and Music drives 2-3 times each and then set it to shutdown afterwards
 
I'm using uTorrent at the moment because it is lightweight and makes no impact at all on performance. Azureus is kinda bloated and slow (Java, eeew :p).

I'll take a look at the site, locutus12, thanks. :)
 
Or looking at it another way, you should (have) partition(ed) the drive so that you have 1 partition (or drive) reserved for downloading only.

Personally I only use my C drive for XP and app installs. All other stuff like torrents/newsgroups I point towards a seperate partition on a seperate drive. This way my pc doesnt need defragging more than once every month (or less).

Then I move the downloaded stuff to another partition once its finished, this also seems to keep drives unfragmented.

Still, the above is mainly because I like to try and stay organised (years of working with XP has shown me the error of my ways on using 1 large partition) and am fairly anal about where stuff is saved etc.

Also depends if you have a spare drive.....
 
BruceLee said:
Or looking at it another way, you should (have) partition(ed) the drive so that you have 1 partition (or drive) reserved for downloading only.
Click to expand...

I wasn't the one who partitioned it, this was a prebuilt computer. I'll eventually get around to doing it, but I'll need more hard drive space before I do that, otherwise I'll lose all my stuff. :p

Edit:

This is a real problem for me now, it was pretty much the same after my defrag yesterday as well.
 
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It really doesnt look like you have enough space left on that drive to let XP work correctly anyway. How big is the drive?

I would really think about getting another drive mate, 80gb can be had for under £40 last time i checked, and that should be enough to keep you going.

Saying that, being on Bulldog I've managed to fill a 250gb drive in a matter of months, even with burning stuff off etc, so I know what its like, was managing before on a single 120gb, but I'm an advocate of partitions :p
 
you can still resize your partitions to create a new one for downloading to..

symantec partition magic 8.05 thats what you'll want :)
 
Uhh is anybody with Pipex? I find that they don't let me torrent at all :( They usually just die after a few minutes and i have to reset my internet connection. <boo>/thread hijack :)
 
What percentage of space is free on your drive?

I found that ideally you need ~20% free to have any chance of a good defrag as Windows needs to move stuff around when defragging and with too little free space that can't happen.
 
It's a 200GB hard drive. 50GB free (25%).

It's this full because I filled up my 80GB drive and now I have hardly any space to put my stuff.

This hard drive's got 50GB or so free. Could I resize this to make C: 140GB and F: 50GB, then move 50GB of the stuff on C: to F:, resize again to make C: 90GB F: 100GB, and so on until C: is about 20GB and F: is 170GB?

Are there any other partitioning scheme that would be better for me? C: for Windows and applications, F: for personal files and G: for my page file (Would this increase performance?), for example?

All I really use my computer for is the occaisonal gaming session, watching movies, listening to music, chatting, and heavy internet browsing.
 
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