Defrag

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs.
How will I get them if I get a new computer?
--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

On 8/18/2017 5:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

Win7 = Vista 1.5

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

There are many tasks that can quickly fragment files, particularly if
those files are larger than a sector in size. Knowing how to manually
run defrag is useful to those of us who do such work.

--
best regards,

Neil

On 18/8/2017 01:25, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

That's the default, but if your computer is turned off when defrag is
scheduled to run . . .

Isn't it about time MS released a filesystem that doesn't need
defragging? Other OSes have them. NTFS is a quarter of a century old for
god's sake! Even with all those patches installed over the years, its
foundation is still ancient technology. Time to replace it with
something better. Or enable Windows so it can use other filesystems.

Stef

On 8/18/2017 10:42 AM, KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:30:49 -0400, Neil
wrote:

On 8/18/2017 5:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

Win7 = Vista 1.5

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

There are many tasks that can quickly fragment files, particularly if
those files are larger than a sector in size. Knowing how to manually
run defrag is useful to those of us who do such work.

There is a manual way. Get an ssd and forget defrag.
If you analyze a ssd it really looks very bad. Confused me the first
time !

Yes, one can forget defrag with an SSD, but then one should learn about
trim. SSDs are OK for the work that typical users do, but for those
whose work involves a high volume of extensive writes, they have their
issues that need to be understood.

--
best regards,

Neil

KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:30:49 -0400, Neil
wrote:

On 8/18/2017 5:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?
Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?
Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

Win7 = Vista 1.5

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

There are many tasks that can quickly fragment files, particularly if
those files are larger than a sector in size. Knowing how to manually
run defrag is useful to those of us who do such work.

There is a manual way. Get an ssd and forget defrag.
If you analyze a ssd it really looks very bad. Confused me the first
time !


KenW

Contrary to popular opinion, there are still reasons for
defragmenting an SSD.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRe...YourSS D.aspx

"Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes"

"necessary due to slow volsnap copy-on-write"

"If an SSD gets too fragmented you can hit maximum
file fragmentation (when the metadata can’t represent any more
file fragments) which will result in errors when you try to
write/extend a file."

It's not the "seek time of zero" property. It's more the
side effects of the file system design that require it.
But it isn't done all that often, or to all the files.

*******

For example, I noticed early on, that when the Search Indexer
was indexing, it was writing to Windows.edb (the search database).
Great, except, other things are also writing the file system
at the same time. This means writes to Windows.edb are interleaved
with other activity, and the space it gets is not contiguous.

If you use NFI.exe, it lists the LBAs used. This sample I just
dug up out of an NFI output, shows a Search Indexer file which
isn't actually fragmented.

File 1023
\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Wi ndows\Windows.edb
$STANDARD_INFORMATION (resident)
$FILE_NAME (resident)
$DATA (nonresident)
logical sectors 11006368-11088415 (0xa7f1a0-0xa9321f)

For example, a file further down in that same volume, looks like this.

File 228076
\Windows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot\Trace3.fx
$STANDARD_INFORMATION (resident)
$FILE_NAME (resident)
$DATA (nonresident)
logical sectors 39431808-39431871 (0x259ae80-0x259aebf)
logical sectors 39435776-39435839 (0x259be00-0x259be3f)
logical sectors 39443104-39443167 (0x259daa0-0x259dadf)
... 42 lines deleted
logical sectors 46455456-46455471 (0x2c4daa0-0x2c4daaf)

There's a limit as to how many logical sector lines, one entry
in the $MFT can hold. So if the file has more fragments than that,
you find a new file number, with the *same* file name. So if
Windows.edb was too fragmented, the file system would open
a second filenum to hold the LBA numbers

File 5678
\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Wi ndows\Windows.edb

and that provides an extension to the file.

The Windows.edb I was looking at, had been extended around 30 times.
It might have had more than a thousand fragments.

There must be some limit as to how many extensions are sensible to do.
I don't expect the file system has "limits", but seeking to all those
filenum entries takes time.

What I notice on recent Windows 10 versions, is this file is
getting defragmented (somehow), and probably not by a
regular, full, defrag.exe run. All it might take, is the
equivalent of Sysinternals "contig.exe" program. But of course,
with better logic than "contig.exe" uses. Contig.exe is not
a defragmenter either. It just looks for a decently large
white space, and re-copies the file. Sometimes, the copy
has fragments, and the command must be issued a second time.
So whatever the Microsoft developers decided on, works better
than that :-)

Using the above article, will give you a better idea of
how Microsoft treats your SSD.

I actually learned how the "severely fragmented" file thing
works, while looking for Windows.edb. And that's why I noticed
it was a pretty dumb idea on 10240, and it seems to work a lot
better now. Maybe they just defragment it at shutdown or something,
just that single file.

If there is a VSS Volsnap issue, then that might take more
writes to correct.

The defrag.exe on the machine, really doesn't defragment everything.
It's selective about what it works on. And very selective
about SSDs...

If you need to "coax" the best performance out of Windows
defrag.exe, you can use JKDefrag 3.36 from the command line,
to push data around. For example, when I had a partition
with "100% fragmentation", and there was only 3GB of white space,
the Win10 defrag.exe refused to consolidate the space and
fix it. Using JKDefrag, I "pushed all the data down" on the partition.
It doesn't matter how much of a "fragmentation mess" this
makes, because if the defragmenter can get out of its rut,
it's going to fix all of it.

jkdefrag -a 5 -d 2 F:

Then, after that, let the Windows defragmenter run. And it
was then able to defragment the partition.

Normally, defragmentation tools insist on a certain minimum
of white space, so they can move stuff around. But if you're
really tight for space, it's possible to "manually assist"
the process. And making a single chunk of white space can help.

Paul

Stef wrote:
On 18/8/2017 01:25, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?
Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

That's the default, but if your computer is turned off when defrag is
scheduled to run . . .

Isn't it about time MS released a filesystem that doesn't need
defragging? Other OSes have them. NTFS is a quarter of a century old for
god's sake! Even with all those patches installed over the years, its
foundation is still ancient technology. Time to replace it with
something better. Or enable Windows so it can use other filesystems.

Stef

I think the current design of Windows 10, handles
the situation with intelligence. Regularly scheduled
defrags keep the "percentage" number low.

They have also added something (special handling) for certain
problem files. And this seems to have been added on the later
versions of Win10.

But I have ways of creating a mess. My "100% fragmented"
volume, a small volume by the way, was the result of doing
a chromium build. And just for fun, I had the defrag.exe take
a crack at that. Well, it needed a little help, because
I wasn't meeting the minimum white space requirement. There
was no place to move the files.

In average usage, stuff like this doesn't happen. If I'd done
the software build on a regular hard drive, with lots of slack, there
would have been no issue at all. But I did the build on a RAMdisk
which was barely big enough for the job. The fragmentation makes
no difference to a RAMDisk, but I thought it would be fun to
see whether the defragmenter utility could handle a pretty severe mess.
Once I'd helped it out, it worked fine. But it couldn't get past
the first bit. Its heuristic wasn't good enough.

Microsoft has another file system. This is newer than NTFS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refs

"In addition, Windows cannot be booted from a ReFS volume."

So apparently, that's not what it is for. And I cannot tell from
that article, whether fragmentation remains an issue or not.

Paul

KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:10:11 -0400, Paul
wrote:

KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:30:49 -0400, Neil
wrote:

On 8/18/2017 5:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?
Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?
Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

Win7 = Vista 1.5

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

There are many tasks that can quickly fragment files, particularly if
those files are larger than a sector in size. Knowing how to manually
run defrag is useful to those of us who do such work.
There is a manual way. Get an ssd and forget defrag.
If you analyze a ssd it really looks very bad. Confused me the first
time !


KenW
Contrary to popular opinion, there are still reasons for
defragmenting an SSD.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRe...YourSS D.aspx

"Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes"

"necessary due to slow volsnap copy-on-write"

"If an SSD gets too fragmented you can hit maximum
file fragmentation (when the metadata can’t represent any more
file fragments) which will result in errors when you try to
write/extend a file."

It's not the "seek time of zero" property. It's more the
side effects of the file system design that require it.
But it isn't done all that often, or to all the files.

*******
Like politics today, everyone and idiots have their own opinion. Right
or wrong.

I will not form an opinion and not defrag. I will depend on the ssd
and trim to do it's thing. I will wait for the manufactures to decide
what is best if I can find the information.


KenW

I was explaining there, why the *Windows* defragmenter can
schedule a defrag operation for your SSD. We were told, some
time back, that Windows would not defragment an SSD and
was smart enough to turn that feature off. But that's
actually not true (after all). There are situations
where Windows will take care of it for you, and
you might not notice what the hell is going on.

Hanselman answers the question, of whether they ever consider
doing it or not at Microsoft. And the answer is Yes, the automation
thinks about it.

Paul

KenW wrote on 8/18/2017 10:42 AM:

Get an ssd and forget defrag.

However, W10 will defrag that SSD (by default) unless you turn it off!

Alek wrote:

KenW wrote:

Get an ssd and forget defrag.

However, W10 will defrag that SSD (by default) unless you turn it off!

It should detect the media type as solid state, and then for that drive
the scheduled "optimisation" will consist of trimming, rather than
defragging.

Andy Burns wrote on 8/18/2017 3:08 PM:
Alek wrote:

KenW wrote:

Get an ssd and forget defrag.

However, W10 will defrag that SSD (by default) unless you turn it off!

It should detect the media type as solid state, and then for that drive
the scheduled "optimisation" will consist of trimming, rather than
defragging.

How would I know that it has done that?

Alek wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

It should detect the media type as solid state, and then for that drive
the scheduled "optimisation" will consist of trimming, rather than
defragging.

How would I know that it has done that?

Right click the drive in question, properties, tools, optimise and it
will tell you the media type ...

https://www.tenforums.com/attachments/tutorials/25842d1485953034-optimize-defrag-drives-windows-10-a-optimize_drive-3.png

On 8/18/2017 9:25 AM, Davidm wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

I don't think so: the drive was quite badly fragged.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman