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does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

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Edvard:
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Here at work, I am chained to a NT4 workstation that I use to scan and print large architectural drawings and let me tell you, that drive gets frag.ment.ed. If you remember, NT4 did not come with a defragger, so I need one. I heartily second the motion on Contig, fast and effective, and it stays out of my way. For that reason, I don't like Power Defragmenter. After it's done, it pops back up... in my way. There's no option to run and exit. So for further convenience, I use an AutoHotKey script to automate it. Here's an example from my script:

--- ---RunWait,[Path]\contig.exe -s [drive letter]:\*.*
ExitAppTo script it yourself, just replace [Path] with wherever your contig folder is and [drive letter] with, well, guess.
And you can also add lines for as many drive letters as you have, like so:

--- ---RunWait,E:\Progra~1\sysinternals\contig\contig.exe -s C:\*.*
RunWait,E:\Progra~1\sysinternals\contig\contig.exe -s D:\*.*
RunWait,E:\Progra~1\sysinternals\contig\contig.exe -s E:\*.*
RunWait,E:\Progra~1\sysinternals\contig\contig.exe -s Z:\*.*
ExitApp
but it seemed like only files that were fragmented tended to benefit from Disk Defragmenter.
--- End quote ---
can someone spell "Duh"?

Carol Haynes:
As the results in our chart indicate, Disk Defragmenter does improve a drive’s performance, but it seemed like only files that were fragmented tended to benefit from Disk Defragmenter.
-mrainey (January 23, 2006, 11:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

How could unfragmented files benefit from a defragremtation run??? I suppose it is possible if a sequence of files need to be loaded and they are all optimised to the fastest part of the disk. I don't know of any defrag program that can do this - and it would need real-time monitoring to assess which files would benefit and that in itself would probably negate some of the gains.

The point is that fragmented files do benefit.

mrainey:
Some more discussions.  I don't know enough about the topic to have a strong opinion.


http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170702532

"I'm still not wild about defragging. Although some server configurations benefit from the increase in data integrity, reliability and performance defragging brings, today's faster drives and large volumes don't see a huge increase in speed from defragging."


http://www.techbuilder.org/recipes/59201471

"While it was true that defragmenting helped older PCs, it no longer applies. Today we have 7200-RPM (rotations per minute) hard-disk drives with improved seek and latency times; many also contain an 8-MB cache buffer. Let's not forget Windows XP's ultra-efficient NTFS (NT File System). For PCs, servers, and workstations equipped with these innovations, defragmenting no longer makes much improvement, if any, to system performance."


http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,86934,pg,8,00.asp

"The PC World Test Center's tests reveal that defraggers don't actually improve performance. And Steve Gibson, president of PC consulting firm Gibson Research Corporation, confirmed our findings."

"The only reason we can see to use a defragger other than Windows' own is to make scheduling easier. (Windows' Disk Defragmenter has no built-in scheduler.)"

Creamy Goodness:
heh wow, i can't believe some of you think defragmenting is unnecessary, but i suppose for some tasks it would not make much difference. loading windows, browsing websites, and many other things would not benefit much from a defragmented drive. Anything that involves working with large files does. Any time you create a large file on a drive that is close to full (extracting a movie, installing a game, etc) there is a good chance of it being scattered across your hard drive in a thousand peices. If you then try to do anything with this file (play the game, watch the movie) it's going to require much more disk activity. If you are burning a heavily fragmented file at high speed to a disk it may not be slow enough to cause the burn speed to drop, but if you try to do ANYTHING else at the same time that requires access to the same disk, it will probably take about 10x as long.

allen:
I've always been a fan of BuzzSaw -- it runs as a process, degragmenting as you go -- essentially keeping a hard drive defragged  -- assuming you run it on a hard drive defragged to begin with ;)

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