defrager alternatives.

I have never understood why defragging is ever necessary.

Auslogics Disk Defrag Free. But only for disc based hard drives. Don't need it for SSD. Use trim function instead.

I've been using Smart Defrag from IoBit for several years now and it seems to work well.

Haven't seen the need since Windows XP.

fj12ryder wrote:
Haven't seen the need since Windows XP.

Hope you are kidding.. Anyway, Auslogics FREE. Get it here.

sherlock62 wrote:

fj12ryder wrote:
Haven't seen the need since Windows XP.

Hope you are kidding.. Anyway, Auslogics FREE. Get it here.

No, FJ is not "kidding".

XP is defaulted to automatically "defrag" the HD anytime the system is not busy or accessing the HD. So in a nutshell if your screen saver is running the OS is automatically defragging when needed.

I have used a few defragging software products back on Win95/98 and honestly they never performed any better than the built in defrag of the OS..

Just be aware, if you have ANY SSD drives in your system YOU DO NOT EVER RUN A DEFRAG.. Doing so is unnecessary and will eventually damage the SSD drive..

Alan_Hepburn wrote:
I've been using Smart Defrag from IoBit for several years now and it seems to work well.

X2. Defraging is not as important as it once was, but it doesn't hurt.

2oldman wrote:
I have never understood why defragging is ever necessary.

Reading from and writing to a rotating disk drive is about the slowest activity the computer will do. As you write to the disk it may not write the file in contiguous sectors but may have to scatter it all over the place. Thus when you re read the file the disk arm has to move about which in relative terms can be quite slow. The defraging attemps to put all the pieces of a single file back together to reduce the time it takes to acces the file.

Depending on how much memory your computer has the more disk activity will occur just to load and run programs. So for this reason it's good to have plenty of free disk space. (And as much memory as you can)

Most users will not notice the delays, but some users just want it to be as fast as it can be.

sherlock62 wrote:

fj12ryder wrote:
Haven't seen the need since Windows XP.

Hope you are kidding.. Anyway, Auslogics FREE. Get it here.

Nope, not kidding in the least. I've seen too many comparison by third parties with no real bias, that show running a third party defrag program on Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 make no difference in the real world operation of the computer. Some benchmark programs can be run to show that they help, but they just convince the already convinced that they work.

Why cause even more wear and tear on your hard drive? And an excellent way to shorten the life of a SSD in pretty short order. Can't hurt? Maybe, maybe not. Hard drives have finite read/write cycles, why push your luck for no real benefit.

I don't defrag often also. I see very little need to do it.
I might do it once a quarter if that. Just like not needing to clean or 'defrag' the registry, there is little to no reason to do so.
As long as you don't pay for the software to do it, there isn't any harm to defrag the hard drive, but there is little reason to do so.