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Sometimes the external hard drive lags some videos, the videos lag on the same parts like 70% of the time, other times they work fine, Seagate told me if I check for errors that it might delete files if errors are found on them, then they told me to do defragmentation on the disk, is there any chance by doing this that it will delete pictures or videos or change anything on them or change their location? What will be changed on folders and files? And does it sound like it could fix the problem? He told me to update drivers and I did and to change option of better performance on the disk and it's still the same problem and I don't want to delete anything on the external hard drive or end up having a video that no longer works.
All defragging does is organize. It doesn't delete.
Every drive should be defragged on a routine basis.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Labonte18
In today's world.. I really don't see defragging being of much noticeable use. Drives are so fast as it is.. In theory, it puts less wear on the drive as the heads won't have to seek all over to read a file, but obviously SSD eliminates that as a problem.
Has anyone LEGIT seen defragging provide noticeable results in the past.. 5 years or so (On a drive made in the past 5 years) or do you still do it based on "well, it makes me feel good and/or I *THINK* it makes things go faster"?
There's truth to that, but if it makes you feel better, do it. lol
The Windows built in GUI for defrag uses the -r switch when running defrag.
-r switch ignore file fragments over 64MB
-w switch tries to defrag all fragments size.
The idea behind the default -r switch is that it wouldn't increase performance for files fragment that are over 64MB. You can buy into that and simply use the default Widows GUI interface or use the command line to control your options for running the defrag utility.
In today's world.. I really don't see defragging being of much noticeable use. Drives are so fast as it is.. In theory, it puts less wear on the drive as the heads won't have to seek all over to read a file, but obviously SSD eliminates that as a problem.
Has anyone LEGIT seen defragging provide noticeable results in the past.. 5 years or so (On a drive made in the past 5 years) or do you still do it based on "well, it makes me feel good and/or I *THINK* it makes things go faster"?
If you want to, you can do some test on a fragmented database file. Do some SQL test database and do some performance tuning.
most modern operating systems work on file systems that use algorithms to minimize fragmentation. i would transfer to linux or mac since they are better.
also since harddrives are so big these days (and many are ssd or hybrid so they dont have mechanical parts that take time to spin up) the likelihood of the os needing to search for contiguous blocks is pretty low.
most modern operating systems work on file systems that use algorithms to minimize fragmentation. i would transfer to linux or mac since they are better.
also since harddrives are so big these days (and many are ssd or hybrid so they dont have mechanical parts that take time to spin up) the likelihood of the os needing to search for contiguous blocks is pretty low.
can someone explain what it is and why it's necessary to do it in order for those few videos to stop lagging? And what does this mean
OS/2's HPFS was very resistant to fragmentation; both FAT and NTFS not so much. In no case should a live file be deleted by a defrag program. It's job is not to free up space, but to optimize the layout of existing files on the disk.
it only removes it from the directory so it can be written over. In effect, the markers that define the location of the files are knocked down so they cannot be seen. However, it is possible to stand those markers back up again and retrieve the files
Yes and no. Deleting a file doesnt really delete it. In a nutshell, it hides it from view, and lets the operating system know that if it needs to - it can overwrite the space that the file exists in.
When you defrag, its very likely that you are going to cause data to be written in one form or another to the space the file exists in - but its not a sure thing.
Under the right circumstances, and with the right recovery software, you could still recover the file.
Source(s): I'm a network administrator. I do this for a living.
The Windows built in GUI for defrag uses the -r switch when running defrag.
-r switch ignore file fragments over 64MB
-w switch tries to defrag all fragments size.
The idea behind the default -r switch is that it wouldn't increase performance for files fragment that are over 64MB. You can buy into that and simply use the default Widows GUI interface or use the command line to control your options for running the defrag utility.
Thank you buddy..... So when I open defrag from MY COMPUTER it uses no switches right?
I would think when defragging you would want EVERY POSSIBLE FRAGMENTED AREA managed...... (For best results)
can someone explain what it is and why it's necessary to do it in order for those few videos to stop lagging? And what does this mean
This is routine maintenance on a drive. This is typically not an issue on a external drive because you don't delete and add files frequently. A hard drive is very much like a record player, it spins and just like a record player it has an arm with heads to read the data.
When you delete a file that space is made available for other files. If a new file doesn't fit into that space fragments can be written into many of these open spaces on the drive. Instead of being able to read the file in one continuous stream of data like you would have when listening to a record the arm has to move around to get the new chunks of data in the different locations. While this will lower performance it's not going to very noticeable accept things like video which need to be real time. If the file is fragmented it *may* cause a lag at the same part of the timeline in a video.
When you defragment all those pieces are moved so they con be read in one continuous stream.
That said unless this video has a very high datarate I'd be a little skeptical about that being the cause. Check the CPU usage as I suggested earlier.
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