Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
Can you provide sources for this? As far as I can tell, by default W7 defrags on Wednesday at 01:00, if the machine is running or can be awakened. On my machines, defrag appears to almost never run automatically.
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Whoops confusion - it's my old NT4 server that defrags when its idle, for some reason my typing brain mistakenly thought the workstations were the same.
My workstations defrag dally at 11:00. Yes, I just read the default for Win 7 is Wed 01:00, so I must have changed it back in 2009.
From what I can see the schedule works providing the workstation is on. The 2 drives on this w/s report they were defragged today, one at 11:03 the other at 11:11, it's currently 14:00ish. When the defrag starts the only way I can discern it's running is by the disk lights, not by responsiveness. It takes a few minutes to do 2x2TB WD Caviar blacks. The workstation also has a 256GB SSD system drive. The WD drives have hefty caches and they're no where near full.
I don't defrag external drives, they're also 2TB WD Caviar Blacks. When they're in use I mount them in a disk dock that connects to a PCIe USB 3.0 hub. My observation is that they're faster than the same drives on SATA 2. Again they have hefty caches and they're not too full - and they are compressed.
I'm just not convinced defragging makes a great deal of difference on modern drives with hefty caches, providing the drives are not close to full.
BR
PS - I just recalled, a friend recently bought her Vista laptop for me to have a look at. It started going very slowly
after she ran Vista defrag (first time in 7+ years). I managed to speed it up a bit, but it really needs a fresh Windows install - I'm awaiting arrival of Vista Business product. Apparently MS tore their VISTA iso's down last year
Why did she do a defrag - because someone screwed around with her email accounts and got her confused, so she 'thought a defrag might help'
