I decided to try Auslogics Disk Defrag. Yesterday I analyzed my C drive and had about 550 fragged files. So I defragged.

For the heck of it, I analyzed it again today and it said there's 235 fragmented files.

Is it normal for a drive to accumulate frag so quickly? Is there some other way I can check to make sure nothing's wrong?

I don't like the current (well, Vista) Windows degragger because it doesn't give you any information on number of files or percentage or anything, so if I run it I have no idea what it's actually doing - which is why I decided to try Auslogics. I also tried Avast!, but good lord that was slow.

Yes, yes it is it, 'cos no normal thing will defrag you completely. =)

Ok, thanks. I'll give that a shot!

I've seen Auslogics finish defragging and then I immediately analyzed and it was still super-fragged.

The good thing is that with most modern hard drives, defrag isn't very necessary. Auslogics gives up a little completeness for a lot of speed (as far as I can tell).

The whole process is pretty overrated in my experience, on modern HDDs anyway. I do it like once a month or so, never had a problem.

Defragging can help a computer run a bit more smoothly, but there are some programs that -intentionally- fragment a drive.

I'm looking at you, Team Fortress 2. Why do you spend thirty to sixty seconds rearranging all the game files on the hard drive at random after shutting down is a bug, regardless of what Valve says.

if you keep a page file, no defrag utility can touch it... the files in that space are fragmented to hell... what you could do is turn it off and then defrag then turn it back on and i bet your fagged file count will be next to nothing.

as for defrag utils i like Defraggler, its the best ive found and getting the important areas and it has a defrag on boot to get the nastys that pop up...

you can also compress your registry for a little more fine tuning

I use Auslogics - it works quite well for me but if your drive is immensely scattered you're going to have to resort to Windows OS built-in defragger which takes much longer and is more thorough.

Auslogics is good to keep on top of things so that you don't have to go hardcore with Windows' Defrag. And THAT is pretty much why I leave TF2 uninstalled nowadays...also the gig update each day was getting a bit costly.

I must admit I'm much less interested in defragging nowadays than before. In the old days it felt so fulfilling watching small red boxes on the screen being re-organized and packed to blue blocks, thinking you are really repairing something.

But quite fast it dawned to me that the partitions which are in active use will just keep getting fragmented quite fast, no matter what you do. So I think nowadays I defragment partitions maybe once a year, even if that. I have some preferred defragger programs I've mentioned earlier in this forum too, as they at least claim to do some stuff smarter than the competition. But don't they all? Mostly I've just stopped caring about fragmentation.

With non-system partitions (ie. data partitions which are mainly for data storage), I prefer defragging them by copying everything from them to a new freshly formatted hard drive or partition. I presume that is the ultimate defragger.

Defragging is done to access files faster, not to solve a black or white problem. Once a month is probably enough unless you gain new files regularly especially large ones.

Remember, there's practically no reason to defrag SSDs if anyone owns one but didn't know.

I also use Auslogics, I find it decent and I like the idea that you can defrag specific files to save time. If you keep a schedule to defrag when the computer is idle you don't have to think about it.

I would have thought so too, but I recently bought a new external hard drive and moved a load of stuff to it, analysed it afterwards and it was fragmented as fuck.

Either Windows specifically preserves fragmentation when it copies (seems unlikely) or it just places things randomly. ._.

Excessive fragmentation is still an issue. However, modern HDDs are larger and as a result it's less likely that the filesystem will have to fragment a file in order to find enough space.

But, I remember my UFS partitions were basically free of fragmentation and in fact didn't even have a utility for defragging files as it wasn't needed. And that was well over 10 years ago on a filesystem what was even older than that.

Some modern filesystems like ZFS will defrag things as they verify the validity of the data and so they have no need for a defrag utility.

I do wish that MS would include the option of checking the fragmentation every day and only defragging it if it gets over X% as you don't generally need to defrag it until it's somewhere over 10%.

On a side note, it shouldn't start fragging until you start running low on space. At which point you will very quickly see it frag all to hell in terms of new files, old ones shouldn't become fragmented without modifying the contents.
Once a month is probably excessive, as long as you have plenty of free space. You don't want to defrag any more often than you need to as everytime you move a portion of a file you run the risk of data corruption. It isn't a large risk, but you get very little benefit out of defragging until it gets to be a significant amount of fragmentation. And even then, only if it's files you use a lot.

What about the state of MyDefrag and UltraDefrag today? I remember both of these were popular choices few years ago. But since Windows 7 came with much improved defragmenting tool, these 2 doesn't seems as popular as they were 4 years ago.

I'm still using UltimateDefrag . ( now version 4 )