Bloody hard drive issues!

Hardware and technical stuff
1

So anyway… I formated about 2 weeks ago. I decided against using anymore Norton programs and decided to use a program called ‘Disk Keeper’ for my defragging needs. Over the entire two weeks I noticed my system running slower. Things took longer to load, listening to MP3’s sucks now, and I can’t watch my TV shows because of massive stuttering. I ran all sorts of tests, spyware, virus scans… ram… heat… I analyzed my drives and Disk Keeper kept saying that the drives were fine and all it needed was an increase in MFT something something ( it did this even after I let it do what ever to it’s recommendations ) … I put it all down to Disk Keeper been a big pile of shit and installed Norton’s again ( except that crappy recycle bin shit and its anti-virus ) …

Anyways, I run ‘Speed Disk’ and my OS partition has 16% fragmentation. My Apps drive has 1.6% , my swap drive partition is 0% .

It took one hour for my OS drive. 24 hours for my Apps and 3 seconds for my swap file . I usually run through things a couple of times just to make really sure and started to do the apps drive again. It got to 50% done in 8 hours so it’s still scrwed, but what really worries me is It reports 5 fragmented files in “$MFT” … exactly what is that? Why is my system running so fricking slow still …

Should I a) Keep defragging in the hopes that it fixes itself
b) Format once again ? ( I won’t be formatting my Apps drive… I can’t really back up 100gig of stuff )

2

You should be able to defragment the hard drive without their “optimized” thing turned on, so in other words-- it’ll consolidate the space but it won’t rearrange everything on the hard drive. This will let you at least get things so they are compacted, and you can work on defragmenting it better over a period of time. Personally I’ve been using O&O Defrag but I have given thought to perhaps changing to Speed Disk (although Speed Disk, last I checked, doesn’t offer automatic background defragmentation while the screen saver is on, etc).

3

Maybe Lloyd or somebody can shed more light on this but I was really under the impression that:

  1. You almost never need to defrag in XP under normal circumstances

  2. The built in defragger does a good enough job.

4
  1. You almost never need to defrag in XP under normal circumstances

is certainly wrong. I’ve had a friend of mine leave his PC un-defragged for 6 months, when I finally convinced him to at least analyze his drive it was 60% fragmented.

5

Yep, one of my drives was 73% fragged. After defragging it, it ran like a dream :)

6

Don’t know your problem, but I’ve used versions of Diskkeeper for 8+ years on corp and home PC’s. I’ve have found it to be one of the best defrag apps available. Using version 9 on my rig ATM with good success.

7

NTFS doesn’t need to be defragged regularly like FAT. It may still help if you notice a lot of head movements during disk accesses, though. And the built-in utility is good enough for the job.

8

It’s been awhile since I messed around with this, but if I recall correctly, the only advantage to non-Microsoft defraggers is either the background mode defrag, or the ability to move certain system files around that the MS defragger won’t. But those usually don’t matter anyway.

XP is more forgiving about not defragging, but if you install and uninstall a lot of stuff regularly, you’ll need to do it every couple of months for optimum performance. But the MS defragger is good enough, if you don’t mind doing it manually.