How would this level of fragmentation slow down my PC performance ?

[sammy2]

I noticed in trying to extract 40gb of data the process was taking a bit longer than usual. I also noticed if I downloaded multiple files playing videos etc can stutter and general navigation is slower. I download and delete various HD movies etc and I believe this may be the read there were so many fragmented block ..How often should I defrag to maintain the highest level of performance ? 





 

[The Evil Overlord]

Good to hear, but don't let yourself get too comfortable with the 'I'll hear if it's dying' mentality, drives can die silently, some click, some beep, some spool up over and over again, some just do nothing.

[seeprime]

The problem with hard drives is that the data transfer rate of the inner bits is about half of what the faster outer tracks provides. An SSD is better suited for you if you want speed. After you delete your movies, or move them to an external HD, a full defrag should give you back much of your performance. At their best 7200-rpm hard drives are only about as fast as the cheapest new SSD's. I suggest that if you get an SSD to stay away from anything that has less than a 4-egg (out of 5)  rating on NewEgg.

[Neyht Member]

So...this is crapware.  This auslogics program, I mean.

[br0adband]

Two tips:

1) Never ever let the amount of free space on the drive (total freely available space at any given time) drop below 15% - seriously. I don't care if you have a 1, 2, 4, 8 terabyte or whatever size drive(s) in a system, I don't care if you've got a RAID 5 setup to ensure redundancy ('cause RAID isn't a backup solution even in spite of people thinking it is), if you allow the actual working freely available space to drop below 15% performance degrades on any operating system with any file system and it's very tough to get that performance back without moving a lot of data from that drive or partition. It's just how things go and on some filesystems, notable HFS+ on the Apple OSX platform, having less than 15% free space to work with can lead to data corruption simply because of that reason alone.

2) With massive storage capacity compared to even a few years ago, it's best practice to make sure you've got plenty of it IF - that's a big if there - you have data that you really wish to keep around and it's not something temporary meaning you intend to keep it for some time.

Having said that, if the majority of that content in red in the OP image is just media files, it's not going to hurt system performance since those are fairly static and unchanging and obviously they're not related to the actual operating system itself. On a storage drive fragmentation is nearly irrelevant even on a physical hard disk because the speed necessary to read media files is itself nearly irrelevant: even high bitrate video files barely crack the need to read more than a few megabytes per second at most.

Either way, if you're gonna defrag that drive then get it done, I'd personally just move the content off the drive to another one then copy it back if you absolutely must ensure it's being done without fragmentation. If I saw a system partition with that kind of fragmentation I'd basically tell the owner of it "You need to stop doing this, seriously...:

As a side note to the comment about about the Auslogics defragger, I've been using the "Pro" version for a few years now since I don't own any SSD hardware yet and it works just fine. It's one of the better ones in terms of performance, actually. A lot of people use Defraggler from Piriform but that's one of the worst performing ones I've ever used (disclaimer: been using personal computers since before defragmentation programs even came into being). Auslogics gets the job done just fine, even the free version works without issues.

[seeprime]

I hope not. Unlikely tho. Health check etc are all okay and I haven't heard any crazy sound coming from it. 

You can download HD Tune free and run a scan on the hard drive to see if there are areas that have large dips in data transfer. If so, image (Macrium Reflect free and Aomei Backupper work well) and replace it with a bigger faster one, or an SSD of the same size.

[br0adband]

As for testing or diagnostic software, don't trust anything except the manufacturer's diagnostic for a given drive. I don't know who manufactured the drive the OP is trying to defrag but, all current hard drive manufacturers do have their own specific hard drive diagnostic tools and those are the only ones that should be trusted - I say that because using tools like HDTune to read the S.M.A.R.T. status can be completely useless as S.M.A.R.T. itself is somewhat useless in general practice, it always has been.

Case in point: I have a shoebox with 11 hard drives in it that are various brands (WD, Seagate, etc) and all of them are "dead" and effectively non-functional but amazingly they all power up when attached to a running computer (using eSATA or ATA/IDE connections in an external USB case or even Firewire in some instances) they all provide S.M.A.R.T. status info that shows 100% clean and good to go.

S.M.A.R.T. is not to be trusted over a full scan from the manufacturer's diagnostic, ever.

That's my $.02 on that matter...

[spaceelf]

blast, I missed something nm

[seeprime]

As for testing or diagnostic software, don't trust anything except the manufacturer's diagnostic for a given drive. I don't know who manufactured the drive the OP is trying to defrag but, all current hard drive manufacturers do have their own specific hard drive diagnostic tools and those are the only ones that should be trusted - I say that because using tools like HDTune to read the S.M.A.R.T. status can be completely useless as S.M.A.R.T. itself is somewhat useless in general practice, it always has been.

Case in point: I have a shoebox with 11 hard drives in it that are various brands (WD, Seagate, etc) and all of them are "dead" and effectively non-functional but amazingly they all power up when attached to a running computer (using eSATA or ATA/IDE connections in an external USB case or even Firewire in some instances) they all provide S.M.A.R.T. status info that shows 100% clean and good to go.

S.M.A.R.T. is not to be trusted over a full scan from the manufacturer's diagnostic, ever.

That's my $.02 on that matter...

I agree 100% on the SMART tools. Only use the manufacturer's diagnostics. HD Tune is a great program to check for issues that lead to low data transfers. That is a key thing we always check for. If the drive has good results when connected to another PC, but has a poor data transfer rate on the original one, or a high access time, it points to a possible infection or drive controller on the motherboard. 

[roguekiller23231]

large fragmented files don't usually cause a problem, as long as the fragments are big, smaller files that are fragmented will slow down the system.

the stuttering video might be down to graphics drivers being outdated or using default windows drivers.

with Auslogics Disk Defrag, run a 'Defrag and optimize' once every 2-3 months, and do defrag once ever 1 or 2 weeks. 

[protocol7]

I had something like this happen to me back on Windows 7. I always keep the PC running so I assumed it was defragging away when needed. But even though it said one of my drives had zero fragmentation it was actually a mess, a lot like the OP's. Because there wasn't enough free space (I think if it's less that 10% Windows defrag won't even try) it was just skipping the drive and letting it get more and more fragmented. I had to use PerfectDisk to get it defragged properly.

[Rockmilk]

Clean up space with privazer http://privazer.com/

Then run this defrag tool. http://www.toolwiz.com/en/products/toolwiz-smart-defrag/