David Mark

When i use pocketdvx and dvd decrypter, i have to defragment my hard drive on my pc at an alarming rate. I don't mind that as I do it regularly anyway.

Big concern is am I doing any damage to the pc?

Thanx

David

swhoutx035

Originally Posted by David Mark

Big concern is am I doing any damage to the pc?

No, not by defragging the hard drive. It shouild actually help.

derekweb

It's the writing, rewriting and other stuff that is constantly churning. As long as you continue to defrag, your HDD should still be good for it's stated life span.

RICOUK

I read somewhere that defragging should be done when the computer is not in use as it is not good for the drive to be rearranging and writing new data at the same time, just a little warning. I've always done mine when I watch a film or something away from my computer.

__________________
My "My PDA" now updated with hints and tips including a ROM fix for the RX3700 series and installing Transport Tycoon onto your PDA.

phreaker18

Originally Posted by RICO

I read somewhere that defragging should be done when the computer is not in use as it is not good for the drive to be rearranging and writing new data at the same time, just a little warning. I've always done mine when I watch a film or something away from my computer.

what software do u use to defrag ur PPC..... id like to do the same... n what do u mean by defrag ur hard drive... r u refering to the ROM/ RAM??

__________________

||CoGiTo eRgO SuM||
WM 5 back to WM 2003 SE

cooldude1015

Originally Posted by phreaker18

what software do u use to defrag ur PPC..... id like to do the same... n what do u mean by defrag ur hard drive... r u refering to the ROM/ RAM??

He's not talking about his PPC, he's talking about his PC.

The only thing I know that you can defrag on your PPC is the flash disk, but then again I read somewhere tha defragging your flash disk doesn't actually do anything either.

RICOUK

With storage disks such as SD cards it normally best tp just reformat them as they are relativly small compared to hard drives in a pc. There is not much room for data to defrag in the first place. Performance loss is minimal and will not improve performance like a defrag on a pc.

__________________
My "My PDA" now updated with hints and tips including a ROM fix for the RX3700 series and installing Transport Tycoon onto your PDA.

derekweb

Performance in terms of speed, probably not, Rico.

However. Has anyone addressed the issue of storage space, since most cards are formatted to FAT16, 512 standards? With a heavily fragmented card, this becomes a storage space issue, as you will have a LOT of unused but "taken" space.

Defragmenting a drive was a dual purpose idea. The first is the most popularly known reason: To speed up accessing to personal data files. The second was to better optimize the STORAGE of that data, so that it freed up more room on the partition.

Someone who is a FAT expert can probably enunciate better on the vagaries of storage and the individual bits and bytes on a drive. Hope this helps.

imported_Fenix

Actually it doesn't free up more rrom on the partition. In terms of FAT the only problem is the amount of clusters it can address. Since FAT table is 16 bit, it can only address 65536 clusters. So if you have a 10G hard drive partition, then there the cluster size is 160KB. Which means for 10, on average, every file you will be wasting 80KB in average. Now 10G HD is tiny by today's standard. But still that's a lot of wates. Since for 10,000 files you will be wasting 800MB of space. Compare to if you have a 4K page size on NTFS, you will only be wasting 39MB of space.

But it is wrong to say a defrag will free more spaces, no it won't. Because the allocation is the same no matter what, and the space wasted for the file is the same no matter what. The difference however is performance. To create a new file on a highly fragmented disk, it means you will have to split the file up into many many pieces. In doing so, you have to go to many different prat of the hard drive to read that file. Now if the disk is defragmented, then files are continous, so you just read sequentially, faster, less hard drive head movement, and speedier file access. After all, the slowest part of HD is to move the head from one place to another.

And yes since for solid state memory, the access time is much faster than HD (no head movement, just read the address line and get the data). A defrag does not improve file access much unless you have tons and tons of small files that you constanted switch, update, delete, etc. That's rare. I've have some of my CF cards not formated, not defragmented, etc for years, they still work at about the same speed as I initially get it. If I don't defrag my HD, well I notice performence degradation very quickly.

As for worrying HD will go bad due to defragment, no way. These days IDE HD have a MTTF of 1,000,000 hours (like the Maxtor MaxLine III I'm using) That's more than 100 year if you use it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In fact I spead from experience. For the past 10 years, I've gone through tons of harddrives. I have some computer that's 24/7 on, there are some that are on just during work. But still the rate of failure is pretty even among them. The only one that I know failed a bit more easily is if the HD is constently under pressure yet wasn't cooled properly. They tends to go up in smoke a bit quickly. But if cooling is not an issue, the HDs really last a long time under constand read/write. So I won't worry about it.

derekweb

Originally Posted by Fenix

Actually it doesn't free up more rrom on the partition. In terms of FAT the only problem is the amount of clusters it can address. Since FAT table is 16 bit, it can only address 65536 clusters. So if you have a 10G hard drive partition, then there the cluster size is 160KB. Which means for 10, on average, every file you will be wasting 80KB in average. Now 10G HD is tiny by today's standard. But still that's a lot of wates. Since for 10,000 files you will be wasting 800MB of space. Compare to if you have a 4K page size on NTFS, you will only be wasting 39MB of space.

There we go. That was what was rattling around in my braincage, but I couldn't throw it out there. It frees up clusters, not giving you more room, but just allowing the clusters to be used by something else. In any case, it IS more efficient. But it's the only reason I'd do a defrag on a card. Otherwise, because it's "solidstate", and rather fast at that already, I wouldn't worry too much about defraging a card.