How many passes before defrag finishes?

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.

Generally not likely because harddrives read files far faster than what is necessary to read a video file...even if it were 1080p  Its far more likely your system is choking on bad decoder or the cpu not being able to keep up if its a high bitrate high resolution encode.  Sometimes a file will be encoded in such a way that dxva acceleration doesn't work quite right, and you have to decode it using something vlc.

Sooo...you want to say that my i7 2600k @ 3.4-4.0GHz with 8GB RAM 1333 OC @ 1600MHz is choking something ? I don't think so. After defrag no problems...weird coincidence or .... ? I even re-installed OS 3-4 months ago, clearing my PC every day with CCleaner, once per month of two I fully scan my PC for viruses with Anti-Malwarebytes program which does its work pretty good.

Sooo...coincidence ? Is it a fact that you are trying to state about HDD's reading speed or just a theory that you learned from reading somewhere or got in school told by teacher that hadn't doubts about things and has not tried to make sure if his theory is correct ?

Sooo...you want to say that my i7 2600k @ 3.4-4.0GHz with 8GB RAM 1333 OC @ 1600MHz is choking something ? I don't think so. After defrag no problems...weird coincidence or .... ? I even re-installed OS 3-4 months ago, clearing my PC every day with CCleaner, once per month of two I fully scan my PC for viruses with Anti-Malwarebytes program which does its work pretty good.

Sooo...coincidence ? Is it a fact that you are trying to state about HDD's reading speed or just a theory that you learned from reading somewhere or got in school told by teacher that hadn't doubts about things and has not tried to make sure if his theory is correct ?

Well for a cpu like that, not likely.

But same goes for the harddrive, even a raw bluray rip tends to be around just 30GB of video data.

In theatrical 2k it tends to be just around 30MB/s http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128963-how-digital-technology-is-reinventing-cinema/2  Bluray is more in the teens to 40 ish Mb/s, megabits not bytes which is 8x less, and about 5Megs a second to show you how low a load that is.

http://www.storagereview.com/western\_digital\_caviar\_green\_2tb\_review\_wd20ears

even slow green drives read sequentially many times faster than whats necessary for video.

Anyways as I said dxva should be accelerating the decode via gpu.  If that fails to work right on a strangely encoded video it can jerk, and in such case run something like vlc player assuming you are playing an mkv or such file and decode it with cpu only to see if that solves the problem.

You might be able to trip it up if you random access the drive enough while its reading the movie, but you already said you have an ssd for os/apps so thats not likely.

Course the other possibility is your drive is failing, do a S.M.A.R.T. check on it, run your manufacturers diagnostics on it...  or simply let it defrag since any hard to read sectors will be reallocated if you are lucky, until it runs out of spare sectors of course.  I think stuff only reallocates on writes though.

And no, you don't need to run ccleaner each day, it might even be counter productive to wipe out your cache files like that.  This stuff is just fact, only a certain amount of data needs to be read to play a video file, and drives are much faster than that.  I'm sure a variant of your drive is benchmarked on storagereview if you look for it, and you can go look at its sequential read performance yourself.

My theories are varied because I can't read your mind, or see what you haven't told me, I can only guess based on the little information contained in your posts.

Well for a cpu like that, not likely.

But same goes for the harddrive, even a raw bluray rip tends to be around just 30GB of video data.

In theatrical 2k it tends to be just around 30MB/s http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128963-how-digital-technology-is-reinventing-cinema/2  Bluray is more in the teens to 40 ish Mb/s, megabits not bytes which is 8x less, and about 5Megs a second to show you how low a load that is.

http://www.storagereview.com/western\_digital\_caviar\_green\_2tb\_review\_wd20ears

even slow green drives read sequentially many times faster than whats necessary for video.

Anyways as I said dxva should be accelerating the decode via gpu.  If that fails to work right on a strangely encoded video it can jerk, and in such case run something like vlc player assuming you are playing an mkv or such file and decode it with cpu only to see if that solves the problem.

You might be able to trip it up if you random access the drive enough while its reading the movie, but you already said you have an ssd for os/apps so thats not likely.

Course the other possibility is your drive is failing, do a S.M.A.R.T. check on it, run your manufacturers diagnostics on it...  or simply let it defrag since any hard to read sectors will be reallocated if you are lucky, until it runs out of spare sectors of course.  I think stuff only reallocates on writes though.

And no, you don't need to run ccleaner each day, it might even be counter productive to wipe out your cache files like that.  This stuff is just fact, only a certain amount of data needs to be read to play a video file, and drives are much faster than that.  I'm sure a variant of your drive is benchmarked on storagereview if you look for it, and you can go look at its sequential read performance yourself.

My theories are varied because I can't read your mind, or see what you haven't told me, I can only guess based on the little information contained in your posts.

HD Tune Pro does the work fine for checking, and just in any case S.M.A.R.T. is turned always on (I think) in BIOS, if that's what you mean. I haven't had any problems, so I haven't searched for particular information regarding HDD's, except what to do when HDD starts to make weird sounds and such, cause I have experienced HDD failure and death of it, but mine doesn't show any signs of not even close to start failing, yet, I haven't done any checkups, cause I haven't done anything that could push its limits to max, but I will run HD Tune Pro and then research a little bit about SMART and manufacturers diagnostics.

Oh and...yes, mostly I got problems playing .mkv files only. I'm using Splash Pro EX as primary video player, for 10-bit video's I use VLC, and in any other bad case, I use Media Player Classic as last.

Last movie that I had problems and defrag kinda fixed it/maybe not, maybe just coincidence, but

it was Riddick Unrated DC 2013 1080p WEB-DL H264.