Drive space and fragmentation?

Cloud G

New Member
Tek, you mentioned in another post about having delete WoW to make room. I gotta ask, just how much free space do you have, and how fragmented is the drive?
 
After clearing 8GB, I have about 10GB left on a 100GB hard drive.

As for fragmentation...I don't know. But I did defragment the drive about, oh, a month ago. I could probably stand to defrag it again.
 
I asked cause one of the XP 'best practices' is to always have at least 5gb free. The defrag bit is cause even with awesome seek time, if a drive has to scan all 100gbs looking for pieces...then you're speed with suffer.


It's crazy...but try running a check disk on the drive. It fixed quite a few slowness issues at the office.
 
I almost never defrag, because it barely ever clears up any space at all, and with 700GBs I am currently not worrying about space...
 
Defraging has nothing to do with clearing space. It's optimization. It only really becomes a problem when the drive starts getting full. And you're moving lots and lots of files on and off the drive.
 
Windows stores files by dumping them in whatever free space comes up first. If you delete a bunch of small files then download a large file it will be broken up all over the disk. Most unix filesystems try to "fit" data into an area where there is sufficient room to not be fragmented. Although fragmentation does occur, it is mostly on files that get rewritten a lot.

Defragmentation is designed to join files together such that they arn't spread all over the disk so that the hard disk won't have to do random seeks all the time. Fragmentation can cripple virtually any windows machine that has both writing and deleting occurring, due to it's rather bad design.
 
Back
Top