Defraggler taking excessively long time

[reichmaj]

Forum

 

I recently transferred 1.52 TB of files to a 6 (5.45) TB LaCie 2Big external drive. The preceded to use Defraggler to defrag the files after transferring.  The disk was approximately 4% fragmented.  It took approximately 87 hours (~ 4 days) to defrag.  At one time, it took approximately 9 hours to go from 64% to 70% finished.  The disk does contain approximately 700 movie files which maybe have been the culprit.  Does it take a long time to defrag larges files?  Either way 4 days seems and inordinate amount of time.

 

 

Sincerely

 

[mta]

what is the connection method to the external drive?

was the external drive in use at the time (apart from the defrag)?

what sort of defrag was performed?

is the drive used for any system file locations, like pagefile, temporary files etc?

 

next time, just select the files you want to defrag and click Defrag Highlighted.

4% fragmentation was not worth 4 days of effort and you will see no performance gain when watching those movies.

depending on the type of process carried out, maybe it also rearranged all the files for a 'better fit'.

[reichmaj]

Connection method : USB 3.0 hub

External drive use: It is  my backup (#1) drive - no backups during the defrag

Type of Defrag - Full

Drive Use.  No.  The Lacie is strictly used for backups and it also maintain my movie library. I run "SyncbackPro" every other day to back up my local drive and then (now) backup the LaCie (which was just defragged) every Sunday evening.

 

Yea I've set Defraggler to defrag at > 5% right now.  The rearrange comment seem correct as I regained ~ 18 of the little white marker squares.  So it just must have been a case or rearranging the hard rive.  But 4 days was a long time.  It only took a copy of hours to transfer the 1.52 TB of data from my NAS over to the external rive.

[mta]

if that drive is only for backups and movies, you should care very little about fragmentation.

in the event you need to restore from it, ideally that'll be never (yeah right) or at most, once in a blue moon, and the file fragments will be hunted down during the transfer process.

and as for movie watching, most media players have a buffer to handle just such I/O activity from hard drives, so while the fragments of a movie are being found, the movie uses the buffer cache until it gets filled by the next disk I/O call.

 

if that was mine, and you really wanted to 'keep it clean', consider setting the fragmentation trigger to at least 20%.

[Willy2]

- USB backup drive: I would avoid a defragment process as much as possible. I defragment my USB backup drive only every say 3 months. And then I only touch the fragmented files. (Backing up occurs about every 2 weeks.)

[reichmaj]

mta - that's fro the recommendation.

 

Willy2 - its a 6TB hard drive connected through a 3.0 USB hub.

[Willy2]

- I would avoid defragmenting any USB drive as much as possible.