defragging my hd

[reorith]

after clearing up 80 gigs of freespace by deleting some material, i decided now would be a good time to defrag my hard drive. problem is, i haven't defragged this particular volume before, so far it has been defragging for six hours. and naturally,i have some questions for you more tech savvy individuals.

1. should it take this long?
2. is there anyway to assess how long it should take? the box doesn't have a progress bar
3. is the planar shepherd really as broken as it seems?
thanks.

[Krrth]

1)yes, depending on how large the drive is.
2)most defraggers have a bar on the bottom that lets you see a graphical representation of the progress.
3) yes, yes it is.

[Renegade Paladin]

Freespace? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freespace)

:smallbiggrin:

[thubby]

*dreams of having 80 free gig*

[Renegade Paladin]

*dreams of having 80 free gig*
Hard drives are cheap, relatively speaking. I have two 500 GB drives in my computer, and between the two of them there's 555 GB free space.

[Erloas]

2)most defraggers have a bar on the bottom that lets you see a graphical representation of the progress.


For whatever reason the defrag with Vista has done away with the progress bar, which is quite annoying.



As for how long it takes it depends on the speed of the drive, how full the drive is, and how fragmented it is. If you don't do it much you can expect it to take a very long time the first time.

[Krrth]

For whatever reason the defrag with Vista has done away with the progress bar, which is quite annoying.



As for how long it takes it depends on the speed of the drive, how full the drive is, and how fragmented it is. If you don't do it much you can expect it to take a very long time the first time.

So it did. I never realized that before.

[xPANCAKEx]

first time i de-fragged my current computer its took 2 days... but everything sped up shedloads afterwards

[Blayze]

Whatever you do, don't stop it midway through and start it up again later. It'll only take longer.

[valadil]

The longest I've heard of was 3 days. Most of the time letting it go overnight is plenty of time.

[thubby]

Hard drives are cheap, relatively speaking. I have two 500 GB drives in my computer, and between the two of them there's 555 GB free space.

maybe i'm just behind, but i couldn't think of 500 gig worth of stuff to put on a computer

[Mando Knight]

Hard drives are cheap, relatively speaking. I have two 500 GB drives in my computer, and between the two of them there's 555 GB free space.

Good thing, too. A couple of years ago, when I bought my computer, I thought "Eh, probably won't use much more than 80 gigs anyway for stuff that I feel like keeping." Then I bought a 500 GB hard drive because I was wrong. And purchasing the amount of extra RAM and hard drive space now costs half as much as what I paid for just the hard drive two years ago. :smalleek:

[reorith]

hurrah it is done! and i've scheduled it to defragment automatically!

[Avilan the Grey]

For whatever reason the defrag with Vista has done away with the progress bar, which is quite annoying.


I use SmartDefrag. Brilliant little program. And you get all that lovely info that was aviable in DOS defrag way back then... :smallsmile:
Plus you can set it to autodefrag when the computer is idle.

There are so many good freeware programs out there these days!

[Avilan the Grey]

maybe i'm just behind, but i couldn't think of 500 gig worth of stuff to put on a computer

Pr0n? :smalltongue:

Seriously though; we have one 350Gb disc almost full with MP3s (we have done away with the stereo and have ripped all our CDs to the computer).
And then we have another drive with 300Gb of M4v (mp4) files of our ripped DVDs to go on our Iphones.

Add to that the disc images of games (I so prefer not having the disc in as I play) which are somewhere between 2Gb and 8Gb in size.

[FdL]

Any hard disk can be filled. That's rule number one.

No matter how huge it may seem, you will get to a point in which you have less than 20% free and wonder what the hell is taking so much space.

[Renegade Paladin]

maybe i'm just behind, but i couldn't think of 500 gig worth of stuff to put on a computer
Games, video files, the complete Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium and associated files (let me tell you, video editing is memory intensive, and the programs themselves aren't exactly cream puffs either), and a total backup of the primary hard drive sitting on the secondary make up a large amount of the occupied space on mine. I don't anticipate filling it; the only reason I have two 500 GB drives is because my old primary died on me, and I bought a 500 GB to replace it with since it was only marginally more expensive than drives half its size.

[RTGoodman]

Pr0n? :smalltongue:

Hey, my first roommate in college had something like 12 gigs of it saved to his HD. Apparently he just downloaded whole sites worth, just in case.

Of course, a couple of months into the semester his computer crashed and his dad, a tech support guy, fixed it and FOUND said stash (it was "cleverly" hidden in a "School Work" folder or something) and deleted every bit of it.

[Avilan the Grey]

Any hard disk can be filled. That's rule number one.

No matter how huge it may seem, you will get to a point in which you have less than 20% free and wonder what the hell is taking so much space.

Isn't there a law somewhere... Obviously written down when hard drives were expensive and small, but still somewhat valid:

(From memory) "The more space a necessary new application needs, the less free space you actually have on your HDD".

[Smight]

Pr0n? :smalltongue:

Seriously though; we have one 350Gb disc almost full with MP3s (we have done away with the stereo and have ripped all our CDs to the computer).
And then we have another drive with 300Gb of M4v (mp4) files of our ripped DVDs to go on our Iphones.

Add to that the disc images of games (I so prefer not having the disc in as I play) which are somewhere between 2Gb and 8Gb in size.

c'mon mad don't download mp3, do,'t you know how expensive are drugs and fur and private jets, think of all those poor artists,