How many passes before defrag finishes?

Anonymous
2010-06-28T19:50:57+00:00

Original Title: "Defragmenting hard drive"

I am try to defrag my hard drive. It's on its 4th pass in 24 hours. How many passes does it make before it's done?

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Anonymous
2010-06-28T22:55:23+00:00

have seen as high as 7.

they seem to get faster the further along it goes.

look into using AUSLOGICS degragger instead.

faster and also has an option to move system files to the front.

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*I am try to defrag my hard drive. It's on its *

*4th pass in 24 hours. How many passes does it make before it's done?*

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* What you have already tried to fix the problem

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-05-16T05:55:01+00:00

    im on my sony 500gb vaio and it is on it's 12th pass hope not to get to 20 if it does it will take like 4hrs to finish.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-06-21T15:56:58+00:00

    I'm running it now on my laptop's HDD.  It should have been running at the end of each month as scheduled, but has not run once for over a year.  It's completed 9 passes after running for >12 hours.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-06-21T21:04:17+00:00

    Thanks for the info. Mine is going through pass 6 right now and is moving right along compared to earlier passes. Will look into AUSLOGICS

    http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_disk_defrag_difference

    that is an actual comparison

    from the year 2008.

    Another vote for Auslogics here. I have not used the built in defragmenter in Windows for years now! My time is more valuable to me than that.

    I'm sure you've heard of the placebo effect my friend.

    It doesn't matter if its from 2008, defragging is a technology that is old as dirt.  You are sorting and consolidating files.  Why does it take so long?  People have terabyte drives now, and platter harddrives still are slow when reading and writing, I don't the exact read write strategy but mixed use a drive can easily drop to 20-30MB/s, and so moving hundreds of GB is going to take a long long time, you can't get around the fact that you have to move files.  Its like asking how can you cheat when moving your belongings to a new house?  Anyone that claims they can do it faster than physically possible is lying to you.  So basically the only thing auslogics can do is set the bar lower, if they finish faster they just have to be telling you its done at a much less finished point, or they just do a quick and dirty defrag.

    Anyways if you want more control over your defrag just download ultradefrag.  uses windows defrag at its core but gives you more control.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-06-21T21:08:45+00:00

    I'm on pass 25 in hour 3.5. No end in sight.  Does seem faster with each pass. Page file is win managed. 2TB SATA3 HDD about 1/3 full.  12G RAM and quad core i7 processor (?3820).  Sporadic multitasking during this session (x1 hr).  It said last run was about 10 days ago - hard to believe it got that fragged in that time.  1st time I'm manually running the win defragger since getting machine in 6/12.  I'll be patient (but am getting tired of waiting).  Going for a long walk now.

    Just calculate the amount of time it takes to move 1/3 of 2 tb at ~30mb/s;)  Its gonna be a  few hours...    people don't seem to get that you can't get around the physical limit of the drive speed, even if your sorting mechanism is perfect.

    And people don't seem to get it doesn't matter if it finishes or not, you can always let it finish when you are not busy, a partially defragged disc is fine to use.

    In fact in your case its optimal, a giant disc with mostly empty space is perfect, most writes have plenty of contiguous space to be written to, further fragmentation isn't an issue.

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