How many passes before defrag finishes?

Did mine just now on Windows 8 machine. Did 12 passes but like others have said it got faster towards the end. Finished in 30 minutes on a 500 GB hdd with 20% used.

I started mine 1,5 hours ago on a 74.1GB hard drive with 10.0GB empty.Windows 8 Pro and on Pass 10 at the moment with 11% fragmented and 4% consolidated.Will be going to bed now and will post as reply to this one and tell you guys when it finished.Of course,it has never had any sort of Defragment before

I have 1.5TB WD Caviar Green, I think the name doesn't changes a lot, so lets stick to 1.5TB drive.

I have separated it into 4 partitions, so, the partition I'm defragmenting is where I store Movies, Anime etc. regarding video files, and it has total of 444GB max storage for that partition, and I'm already defragmenting it whole 12h about now, and at the moment I got at 24th Pass, to pass time I'm playing something in meanwhile, not touching anything that's inside that partition for best performance for defragmentation, so I don't know if it's going fast or slow :D hope it's fast if I have went to 24th Pass in 12h time...while I typed it got to 25th :D Oh...26th, dunno If I should stop or just let it do more Passes ? :D good question.

EDIT: K...I had max 30 passes, just noticed 30th and when I re opened after few sec it showed no more passes, it seems that defrag was completed.

I have 1.5TB WD Caviar Green, I think the name doesn't changes a lot, so lets stick to 1.5TB drive.

I have separated it into 4 partitions, so, the partition I'm defragmenting is where I store Movies, Anime etc. regarding video files, and it has total of 444GB max storage for that partition, and I'm already defragmenting it whole 12h about now, and at the moment I got at 24th Pass, to pass time I'm playing something in meanwhile, not touching anything that's inside that partition for best performance for defragmentation, so I don't know if it's going fast or slow :D hope it's fast if I have went to 24th Pass in 12h time...while I typed it got to 25th :D Oh...26th, dunno If I should stop or just let it do more Passes ? :D good question.

EDIT: K...I had max 30 passes, just noticed 30th and when I re opened after few sec it showed no more passes, it seems that defrag was completed.

It doesn't matter really, large files like movies do not require defragmenting unless you are a movie editor.  The files are too large and read too slow to matter if the file is split into bits.

What matters is how much free space you had, sorting algorithms aren't that smart, they need space to do their work effectively.

I guess if the movie drive was on your main drive and you were reading a heavily fragmented movie file it could affect io performance for other tasks.  If its a separate drive as it should be, then no effect at all.

Anyways go read the maximum pc article posted a few posts back, defrag is partially voodoo, you don't have to worry about It all that much, let It run over night, if you interrupt it, no big deal.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, at a certain point you are talking fractions of fractions of a percent possible improvement in performance.

It doesn't matter really, large files like movies do not require defragmenting unless you are a movie editor.  The files are too large and read too slow to matter if the file is split into bits.

What matters is how much free space you had, sorting algorithms aren't that smart, they need space to do their work effectively.

I guess if the movie drive was on your main drive and you were reading a heavily fragmented movie file it could affect io performance for other tasks.  If its a separate drive as it should be, then no effect at all.

Anyways go read the maximum pc article posted a few posts back, defrag is partially voodoo, you don't have to worry about It all that much, let It run over night, if you interrupt it, no big deal.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, at a certain point you are talking fractions of fractions of a percent possible improvement in performance.

Not worried about interrupting, just how much it affects, just curious about it, not a big deal for me personally.

I read that defragmenting could fix my issue regarding movies, cause when I watch sometimes high quality movies, like 1080p and BluRay (in rare cases) it plays for some time and then starts freezing, like it requires to load a video or something, tried all players I had, but still the same problem more or less, then I read that could try defragmenting, so I tried...and it worked, dunno if that was the case, but now I played same movie with no problems + I have my HDD for quite some time, 1.5-2 years already?

And yes, I have separated drive, I use SSD on which I have Win7 and Win8 stored, and MS Office, everything else goes on HDD.