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general Q. about "fragments" (defragmenting)
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| JM |
what are fragments, in respect to defragmenting a hard drive?
many of my downloaded files are "fragmented" by as much as 1,000 fragments (.avi movies).
just wondering, how a file being fragmanted affects that file? anybody know? let me know plz. thanx
>JM< |
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| Disney |
When a file a fragmented is means it's not stored in one piece on your hard drive. If you HD is very full and you regullary save and delete files, this will cause large files to be stored in smaller part on pieces of the HD that are empty, because you deleted some files.
Just run Norton Speeddisk or something and you will get a visual picture of what I'm trying to explain to you.
[EDIT] And to answer your last question:
If a file is fragmented, like a movie, it can cause your movie player to stall because it has to access different parts of your HD to play it.[/EDIT] |
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| JM |
tnx Disney. so i'm assuming that it's not a bad thing then.
ONE MORE QUESTION....how does this "fragmentation" affect a file that is being burned onto a cd-r. for instance, lets say i'm burning that one movie that's fragmented to a cd-r. does it affect the movie once it's on the cd-r?
thanx for the reply!
>JM< |
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| DarkFall01 |
| No, it doesn't. When ur computer is very fragmented it runs alot slower, since it has to look for the files at the end of the disk and skip the empty middle parts. |
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| Tranc3 |
It doesn't necessarily look at the end of the disk for the files, just wherever the individual pieces, or FRAGMENTS are. So for example, if you had an unfragmented movie, on your disk it would be contiguous data (the movie wouldn't be split-up across the disk or anything like that). The real reason for the slow-down has to do with the FAT tables, but that's a long-ass digression.
So in short, fragmented files == bad, contiguous files == good, and as DarkFall01 said, it won't affect your burned cdr. Unless, of course, your movie is so completely fragmented that it takes so long to look up the individual fragments when it's burning (assuming you do on-the-fly burning) that your burner screws up the disc. But I wouldn't worry about it.;) |
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| JM |
awesome! thanx again for the replies - i'm now more educated:toothless
well i am!...
>JM< |
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| SuperFarStucker |
fragmentation occurs because of 2 major reasons...
a. when a file is written to your drive, it allocates all the space it needs as soon as it finds it, ************ of block size so you might have a 10 meg file written across several 128 k blocks.
b. this problem is compounded by temporary files, including caches, temporary internet files, etc. Since these files are deleted very often they tend to leave big gaps in the middle of otherwise contigiuos places, and then the next time you install something, if it doesn't fit within that gap of deleted temp files, it ends up fragmented (note that programs aren't just one file, so this doesn't necessarily apply in all cases, YMMV)
quite possibly obvious but i hope that helps, to alleviate the problem you can send your temp files to the end of the drive when you defragment (there is a lot of them so it will take forever just to specify that) and do so regularly, and limit deletion of caches to when you power off your computer.
significant performance slowdowns are often attributed to the fragmentation of the registry hives (basically the "universal" database for windows based pcs) and or the pagefile (where your system caches large files such as movies after it runs out of ram/too big for ram footprint). Defragmenting these often will keep your system in good shape, you can do this if you run NT4/W2k/XP by downloading a tool from sysinternals.net called "pagedefrag" and configuring it to run every time at boot (be warned if you have a nonmanually set pagefile or less than 15%ish freespace you will probably have to wait 15 minutes every time your computer boots, so either exclude your swap file from the defrag orrr set it manusally (1.8x your amount of system ram is a good rule of thumb)
good hunting:happy2: :happy2: |
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| Disney |
| quote: | Originally posted by SuperFarStucker
... so either exclude your swap file from the defrag orrr set it manually (1.8x your amount of system ram is a good rule of thumb)...
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Does that rule of thumb still go?
I know it did when RAM was usually never more than 128 MB, but now that people have 512 MB RAM or even more it would make the swap file very large...
Anyway, I still have only 128 MB RAM and a swap file of 300 MB. I use Norton Speed Disk to defrag. This also puts the swap file at the beginning of the disk and because it doesn't change size, it only has to be defragged once! |
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