kcnychief said:
I use Executive Software's Diskeeper Pro, and it runs in the background using very little resources. Whenever it detects my hard drives get to a specified percentage of fragmentation, it takes care of it without being told or prompting me. How about that, a maid who cleans and never complains
Hmm, I wonder if they updated this? The versions of Diskeeper I had owned in the past (for winNT 4.0 and win2k) used to do it based upon a set number of hours apart. One could set each partition as such...
That said, they were adding features in each version
- 3.0 introduced directory, boot time defragmentation
- 4.0 added pageing file boot time defragmentation (though I didn't get 4.0)
- 5.0 (I think it was) added defragmentation of the MFT on an NTFS partition
etc
They might have added this...
And yes, as to various factors already mentioned, it can very on time to completion. Along with CPU speed, is also how loaded the CPU is. Playing a game while defragmenting (with the auto-defrag for instance) it will take longer...
Basically when it defrags it, it puts the various "parts" of the file which are located in each given cluster into sequential order. This was, when it's read from the HD, it can be read sequentially; without it having to check the file table to find where the next fragment is located, and then locating the next fragment, move to that part of the drive to start reading from there...