Quick defrag question

oxygene

oxygene

oxygene

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Been playing Dead Island co-op with a mate lately and to say our loading times are different is an understatement. It takes me around 3x the time to load each new area compared to him. He has the exact same cpu, gfx card and such as me. Same graphics settings ingame so its not a texture load issue. I have 6gb and he has 8gb ram, but that shouldnt be a major issue.

So I've got myself a defragmenting prog (perfect disc) and had a look. In general the hd is fine, but one file, an 830mb music file from Dead Island has 134 fragments. I set Perfect Disk to defrag this file specifically and it came back with more fragments once finished. I tried a full hd defrag and no change. I tried the steam defrag too and no change. Everything comes up saying the files are fine.

This is obv frustrating as my mate uses an external drive to play games off, and I have a 2x500gb striped raid as my games drive, so should be outpacing him! The raid also currently has 320gb / 931gb space so no congestion. Can anyone suggest what I might be doing wrong, or maybe a better defrag program lol. I'm pretty convinced its that single file that causing the problems loading.
 
Might be worth you both running some disk benchmark progs, same s/w, same settings and comparing results. Make sure that you don't have some underlying issue with the storage first.

Also 'My Defrag' might be worth a look and run the monthly defrag. Takes ages the first time as it won't just defrag the files but rearranges pretty much all the files on the disk.
 
On further investigate it turns out his games drive is an internal sata2, whereas I have 2x raided sata1. :/ But even so it shouldnt account for 3x the loading time, specially with identical hardware!
Can anyone recommend any good apps to benchmark my stuff against others of similar spec, or something to spot a bottleneck? I know of gfx benchmarks, cpu benchmarks, ram benchmarks, hd benchmarks. But without comparisons its hard to know what is right and what is bad!
 
Coolasmoo said:
It could be your Antivirus software of something along those lines increasing load times.
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I umm,, dont use antivirus... :p Well not constantly. I run a check sometimes and nothing comes up. I find it doesnt take much awareness to avoid most viruses.
 
Just had a quick fiddle on HD tune and thats saying 150mb/sec max, and around 130 average, so that cant be an issue. This has def got me baffled.
Would me being a higher res then my mates game cause 3x the loading time for extra textures etc? or is that silly lol.
 
That's what we're trying to work out. :)

If his stats come back a lot higher then you know where to look on your set up, if not it eliminates it. All things being equal and it sounds like his set up is pretty close to yours, any benchmarks you do on yours that you don't do on his only give half the story.

At the moment the only benchmark we have is loading this game is quicker on his PC.

RAID also isn't necessarily a massive performance boost. Depends how good the controller and software is, can also be affected by offsets, stripe size, block size etc.

Might be worth checking your BIOS settings for the controller and disks, if there are any. And also seeing what drivers and software etc are available for it, mobo chipset drivers etc, see if they need updating.
 
Is Windows Defender enabled? Drive indexing? I always disable these!

Disable system restore, and delete all restore points. Then clean up any rogue files with CCleaner, and while you're in there run the registry cleaner too. After that run Window's Disk Cleanup.

With system restore still disabled, download and install UltraDefrag. Run UltraDefrag, enable boottime defrag then reboot - when defrag has finished and Windows is loaded back up, run UD again and disabled boottime defrage. Before running a Full optimisation, make sure that any real-time AV software is disabled.

Finally re-enable system restore.

After the above, your machine should hopefully feel snapper.
 
darael said:
Then clean up any rogue files with CCleaner, and while you're in there run the registry cleaner too.
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it's not a good idea to run the registry cleaner. i've seen many tales of woe related to that. ccleaner itself is excellent for removing temp files and whatnot. it's also handy for keeping cookies i want while deleting everything else. but don't trust the reg cleaner.
 
darael said:
Is Windows Defender enabled? Drive indexing? I always disable these!

Disable system restore, and delete all restore points. Then clean up any rogue files with CCleaner, and while you're in there run the registry cleaner too. After that run Window's Disk Cleanup.

With system restore still disabled, download and install UltraDefrag. Run UltraDefrag, enable boottime defrag then reboot - when defrag has finished and Windows is loaded back up, run UD again and disabled boottime defrage. Before running a Full optimisation, make sure that any real-time AV software is disabled.

Finally re-enable system restore.

After the above, your machine should hopefully feel snapper.
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Pretty much everything you shouldn't do in one place :p There's a reason so many W7 pcs are still running from the rc.

Disabling defender, if the av didn't turn it off when installing it's either pants or lacks malware scanning (thus pants :D). Most shut it off, but ppl with mse will leave it on.

Disabling indexing will ultimately slow things down.

Reg cleaners, avoid. Period. If you don't know how to edit the registry you shouldn't touch it. Ccleaner is good for uninstalling stubborn programs however, although for file deletion Eraser is better tbh.

No harm in disk cleaner. Disabling system restore isn't smart. If your hd is so full you can't defrag other files should really go, not these.

Failing to use windows defrag. Now contrary to popular belief the built in defrag is actually quite good, and running it on a regular basis i.e. default does a good job. Was actually written by the disk keeper folks and any file it doesn't move is because there's no benefit from moving. The only thing another defrag program can do is shift large files to the slow parts of the disk, but without telling windows increases access time. Good thing indexing sorts that - oh wait...

N.B. prefetching at boot requires 5 boots to work, as loaded programs are taken from the previous 4, which makes boot time defrag mute if you've allowed windows to look after itself.

As for the op follow these instructions, using the latest build (obviously) and whichever applies to you, x86/x64.
 
d_brennen said:
Probably internet speed. The "loading" screen may not be all loading from disk but server sync too
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Fraid not. 50mb here. Low pings in all things too. Even if its a slow server, it takes the same time in offline mode.

Following the above advice atm, defragging with that app. Will see how that goes.
 
Azuse05 said:
Was actually written by the disk keeper folks and any file it doesn't move is because there's no benefit from moving.
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Just a point of order - the Windows 7 defragger is a completely in-house design with no input from the Church of Scientology fruitcakes. I think WinXP was the last Windows to use a cut-down version of Diskeeper.

But yes, the rest of your comment stands, and the MS defragger does a perfectly adequate job. I'm sure 3rd-party vendors would be delighted to publish benchmarks showing that their products perform better in speeding up a system, but they can't, because no such benchmarks exist. :)
 
Disabling defender increases speed. The OP already mentioned that they do not use AV software. I believe they should install a decent AV such as ESET - but that's my own opinion, and I prefer to prevent an infection occurring rather than disinfecting later on.

I'm not sure why you say indexing slows things down. Nor is it a replacement for the MFT. My belief was that indexing was used to increase file searches - however, your harddrive is often labouring in the background during idle times, indexing files. Personally, I believe it's a waste of time and cannot justify it being turned on for my perhaps fortnightly searches.

I have never had a problem with CCleaner's built-in registry cleaner, on many XP, Vista and W7 machines. I do agree that perhaps it isn't so important for operating systems beyond XP - but I believe it should be ran perhaps monthly as good practical housekeeping.

Would you justify why disabling system restore on a perfectly functioning machine is not a good idea? If you know what you're doing, disabling system restore can prevent headaches (some nasties can hide within system restore). On all my own personal use machines, system restore is not enabled. This has not caused me any problems, has gained me beneficial space, and can speed a harddrive's access time up in some circumstances.

The last sentence in your paragraph about drive defragmenters seems to indicate that you are unaware of the MFT. File indexing does not search for files during idle time, only to update the MFT - the MFT is updated when a file has been created, deleted, moved or changed (and likely other circumstances). To the best of my knowledge, indexing is used for Windows file searches - I do not recall information that might indicate otherwise.

On the whole I agree that Windows defragmenter has improved. But not enough for me to use it.
Azuse05 said:
Pretty much everything you shouldn't do in one place :p There's a reason so many W7 pcs are still running from the rc.

Disabling defender, if the av didn't turn it off when installing it's either pants or lacks malware scanning (thus pants :D). Most shut it off, but ppl with mse will leave it on.

Disabling indexing will ultimately slow things down.

Reg cleaners, avoid. Period. If you don't know how to edit the registry you shouldn't touch it. Ccleaner is good for uninstalling stubborn programs however, although for file deletion Eraser is better tbh.

No harm in disk cleaner. Disabling system restore isn't smart. If your hd is so full you can't defrag other files should really go, not these.

Failing to use windows defrag. Now contrary to popular belief the built in defrag is actually quite good, and running it on a regular basis i.e. default does a good job. Was actually written by the disk keeper folks and any file it doesn't move is because there's no benefit from moving. The only thing another defrag program can do is shift large files to the slow parts of the disk, but without telling windows increases access time. Good thing indexing sorts that - oh wait...

N.B. prefetching at boot requires 5 boots to work, as loaded programs are taken from the previous 4, which makes boot time defrag mute if you've allowed windows to look after itself.

As for the op follow these instructions, using the latest build (obviously) and whichever applies to you, x86/x64.
Click to expand...
 
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