... I don't know. Is 19,947 fragments good or bad?

well the "average fragments per file" isn't too bad, unless that means every file that is stored in more than one sector is fragmented (doubtful). This is worrying:

Oh, I recently de fragged my data volume, its now getting 40MB/s write speeds. not too shabby eh? Especially for software raid on two plain (couple year old) PATA/IDE drives eh? Read speed is dismal (16-27MB/s) though, not sure why.

oh, managed to just get these numbers:

Write Test: 1024.000000MB in 23.819346 Seconds, 42.990265MB/s
Read Test: 1024.000000MB in 28.774792 Seconds, 35.586704MB/s

Pagefile fragmentation
    Pagefile size                              = 512 MB
    Total fragments                            = 2,180

Now that is bad. To make things better you could simulate *nix way of swap by creating a whole partition only for the swap.
19,947 1.24 GBHeh, nice one. My record was around 15k fragments for 500M file when I copied something to a drive that had ~10M free space left afterwards
Percent free space = 3 %That is way too little for NTFS to work correctly. Probably only a few file systems can work with so little free space left, if any.

I doubt that defraging helps a whole lot. Sure, it will improve things but probably not by much. If you defrag the drive let us know how well did it work

3% is too little for any FS*. But yes a defrag WILL help. a whole hell of a lot, till it fragments again and you spend most of your time seeking instead of reading and writing. Freeing up space and then de-fraging is the best bet.

*) Well, actually that depends on the size of the FS. if its several Hundred GB in size, it might be enough, if its several TB in size, then its definitely enough.

edit, oh and I always try to setup a separate partition for my swap, or at least fix its size to 512MB-1GB in size or so. then its quite hard to fragment it
edit2: if you do put it on its own partition, make sure the FS is larger than the file by a fair bit so as not to get that annoying "out of space" dialog every few minutes.

Defragging a drive that full will be murderously slow :p Move some stuff off it temporarily. You would want AT LEAST as much free space as the biggest file, and everything up to half empty will speed it up some more.

Not only slow, but depending on the tool used, impossible. MS's defrag is utterly stupid. restarts on disk access, and cant defrag in many cases.

Try Perfect Disk, O&O Defrag, or Diskeeper (well actually one of them, iirc is made by the same people as the MS defrag... cant recall which)

Why don't you use a file system that doesn't fragment?

Oh, wait, Windows...

No such thing. Some just fragment worse than others.

A decently recent FS will use some "smart" algorithms for allocating pieces of files as close to the proper place as possible to reduce seeks in loading single files. Even better is an OS that manages to pack related files together to reduce on seeks even further. I saw an article the otherday that put out that Ext2/3's anti-fragmentation algorithms are causing files that would otherwise be allocated close to others that are related (say a bunch in a extracted tar, or a split up multi GB file) are spread across your disk, causing a fair amount of seeking when loading many related files, like your init or kde startup.

A good tool would be able to organize your files selectively, put all your startup files in a contiguous section, your app's data all in a contiguous section each, etc.

It's not so bad when it's a fixed file size unless you exceed it (which doesn't happen for me).

Windows wanted 15%, I got 14.5%. I left it over night and it was still 1% of "compressing files."

Needless to say, I have to drop a few more files.

The reason it's so full is that my 200 GB hard drive is dying so I have to throw most of it on my other two.

That's what DVD burners are for.

Which reminds me that I need to go burn stuff to DVD. I only have 2GB free on my HD.

Then why is your swap divided roughly into 2000 256kb pieces?

That's a ridiculous waste of money per GB of storage space.

Because it was changed at one point. It doesn't just magically move around the hard drive on it's own.

!!!!!!!! For $30 i get 300GB worth of storage in DVDs. Where do you get your storage? I want a $30 300GB harddrive.

Harddrives are, unlike DVDs, rewriteable. Personally, I wouldn't pay $30 for a 300GB harddrive with write once read many sectors even though it would have a much higher write speed than a DVD, though, that may be because I only have $30 and have never used more than 40GB of harddrive space.

If you don't set the size explicately, with no room to increase or drecrease, it will move around on it's own.

No it's not. DVDs are a good cheap solution for storing backups, even though they have to be checked every year for quality. If it's not read/write, then storing on DVD makes sense.

Or you could use something like Amazon's S3.

But I have set it to a fixed size.

Sigh... I wan't suggesting you use it as permanent storage, but when you're hard drives are failing, it's better then losing stuff.

Well except that it isn't permanent. I bet my Seagates will last 3x longer than my backup CD/DVDs.

I don't see much fragmentation on windows even when I don't defrag more often than 3 months. Maybe 53Gb free. Sometimes when I'm just sitting there thinking, the disk drive lights up and seeks like crazy for 20-40 minutes at a time, I was assuming it was doing some sort of defrag automatically. No cron type stuff is scheduled at all.

The indexing service often does that. I've also read that windows optimizes your hard disk while idle (ie. defrags it), but I've also heard that it does no such thing. I don't know what to believe

I rarely need to defrag my main drive, but I regularly need to defrag my secondary drives. Data is moved around on those drives much more often and they are usually larger files.

NTFS isn't the most sophisticated file system (it really isn't apologists but it might have been back in the day). Sadly it looks like windows users will be stuck with it for at least a decade to come. Kinda reminds me of IE going stale.

I bet my backup DVDs are more than 3x cheaper than your Seagates.

Statistics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Volume Files
     Volume size                               = 232 GB
     Cluster size                              = 4 KB
     Used space                                = 192 GB
     Free space                                = 41,368 MB
     Percent free space                        = 17 %

Fragmentation percentage
     Volume fragmentation                      = 31 %
     Data fragmentation                        = 37 %

Directory fragmentation
     Total directories                         = 36,656
     Fragmented directories                    = 591
     Excess directory fragments                = 5,170

File fragmentation
     Total files                               = 469,527
     Average file size                         = 548 KB
     Total fragmented files                    = 26,975
     Total excess fragments                    = 167,811
     Average fragments per file                = 1.35
     Files with performance loss               = 26,939

Paging file fragmentation
     Paging/Swap file size                     = 0 bytes
     Total fragments                           = 0

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
     Total MFT size                            = 528 MB
     MFT records In Use                        = 508,637
     Percent MFT in use                        = 94 %
     Total MFT fragments                       = 21

Job Report
Volume (C:):

Recommendations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Findings on C:

    Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found
    27,567 fragmented files and/or directories and 173,002
    excess fragments.

    The average number of fragments per file is 1.35.

    This volume is heavily fragmented, with 17% of the total
    volume space available for defragmentation. If you haven't
    run Diskeeper on this volume yet, it is time to do so. If
    you have run Diskeeper on this volume, you should schedule
    Diskeeper to run more often than it has been running to
    reduce the current fragmentation and maintain a lower level
    of fragmentation. Also, scheduling Diskeeper to run at
    times when system activity is low improves the overall
    performance of your computer. 
1. Free up space on volume C
    by emptying the Recycle Bin or removing any unwanted
    files.
2. Due to the high MFT usage, it is recommended that
    you expand the MFT on this volume. Use the Frag Shield
    option in the Diskeeper Configuration Properties to
    configure the MFT on this volume to a larger size.
3. Due
    to the high memory usage it is recommended that you run
    Frag Shield to expand your paging file.
4. Defragment
    volume C now using Diskeeper.


Health
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Warning!

    The overall health of volume C: is degraded

    The overall health is at "Warning" level for the following
    reasons:

    1. The MFT usage is currently 94 percent of the total MFT
    size, which indicates it is likely the MFT will become
    fragmented.

    2. The peak memory usage since the last reboot is currently
    90 percent of the total available memory, which indicates
    it is likely the paging file will become fragmented.

    3. The volume is heavily fragmented. The average number of
    fragments per file is 1.35.

    4. The free space on this volume is very low (17%), making
    it difficult to defragment the volume.


Access Time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Time to read all files on volume C

    Current read time:      38 minutes

    Optimum read time:     26 minutes

    30% improvement



    Time to read fragmented files on volume C

    Current read time:      103 minutes

    Optimum read time:     91 minutes

    11% improvement

So, what's the best free defragger to use for Windows XP?

The only free ones I know of are the Defrag that comes with Windows, and using Explorer to copy files off the drive, and back on.

There is something called "dirms" (with some strange capitalization), which is a command line defragmenter. I've heard from one of my friends that it's pretty good, but haven't checked myself (I use Diskeeeper).

Oh, Diskeeper Lite is also supposedly free, at least I remember hearing that it is. I don't know how many features were taken out of it, but if its half as good as the complete one, it's worth a try.

I "defragged" at 14.5% (it asks for 15) over night and when I woke up it was still on 1% of compressing files.

Last night, I "defragged" my computer with 15% and now that Red Alert file is in 19.3 thousand fragments.

Bad Windows! ... Bad!

I'll try again tonight, I already removed GTA:SA.

The Windows Defrag utility is about the stupidest one out there. I hear theres some commandline tool thats pretty good.

Don't try the Windows Defragger again unless you want to endanger your mental health . I made some free suggestions in the post above, they're both bound to do better than the bundled one. It simply isn't possible to create a slower and crappier defragger. The one time I used it, it achieved a 2% gain in the "average fragments per file" category, after running for, I don't know, 6 to 8 hours?

Actually, the third time fixed most of it except the biggest files (which unfortunately includes the page file). By defraging, it has gained 7 GB of free space.

But yeah, I'll have to look for a better, third party one.

Diskeeper Lite worked fine today.