Some of what you are saying is true and some is not. Indeed windows does
schedule a weekly defrag of your hard drives . If one of your drives is
an SSD you should disable it for that drive and only that drive. It is
useful to keep a conventional hard drive tuned and has no affect on
performance because it automatically pauses while your machine is in use
and will not start up again until your machine has been idle for a
configurable amount of time, usually 10 minutes. Thus, you should never
even notice it running. This is all configurable in the windows "Task
Scheduler".
73, Rich - W3ZJ
W6SDM Steve wrote:
This came up in a discussion on the DDUtil Yahoo site when several of us
were having problems with DDUtil disconnecting from everything else. The
cause, ferreted out by Steve Nance himself, is the auto de-frag utility
that is in Windows 7.
In it's perpetual effort to add useless, unneeded features while leaving
ones out that may actually do someone some good, the Coke-drinking,
Cheeto-munching programmers at Microsoft have added a utility that
automatically defragments your hard drive at a predetermined interval. The
default setting is "on" at some ambiguous early-morning schedule. Do
yourself a big favor, go into control panel, and turn it off.
You can find the setting under Control Panel, Administrative Tools,
Defragment your Hard Drive. Hit the Configure Schedule button and un-check
Run on a Schedule.
Even if you don't use DDUtil, it's not a bad idea to get this out of your
schedule - particularly if you use a solid state drive.
If you use a solid state drive, like I do, defragmentation is not only
unnecessary but it shortens the life of the drive. If you use a regular
hard drive, it's unnecessary and, depending on the size of the drive and
the speed of your system, can take hours to accomplish. While the defrag
utility is running, your computer will feel like someone else is using it
while you are.
If you have an active computer with lots of files added and deleted, and
your hard drive is three quarters or more full, defragmentation isn't a bad
idea every few months or so - certainly not once per week. Defragmentation
puts all of the available space in once contiguous area and it puts the
fragmented files together, which, ever-so-slightly, speeds up access. Back
in the day of the 20 MB hard drive, defragmentation would yield a
noticeable speed improvement. Not so much anymore.
If you do want to defrag your drive occasionally, I recommend a free
program called Defraggler from Piriform, the same people who make
CCCleaner. It's quick, efficient, safe, and give you a visual indicator of
the lever of fragmentation and its progress.
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