75% Fragmented!

[CLC]

Has anyone seen a hard drive 75% fragmented before? I could hardly believe it, the drive checked out ok too. I wonder how many years it took to get that bad. Right now I am running the defrag and its been over 15 hours and counting

 

[damitman]

It must be a Vista machine,with auto defrag disabled? that is the most long winded OS ever created,lol

 

[CLC]

XP machine actually, it must have never been defraged. I ended up fixing a quickbooks problem on it and noticed it was slow so I checked it out. They had it in somewhere else for a virus removal, whoever did that removed the viruses but never fixed the other problems. When I got it the search function on the start bar didn't even work, along with about every other system tool too. They didn't even uninstall combo fix or fix the start up option menu afterwards.

 

[coffee]

How about this lovely little gem I got in a while back. Customer couldnt understand why it was so slow and having issues...

I hooked the drive up to a donar system and defragged it with a 3rd party util. Forget which one right now.


coffee

 

[Steve202]

I had a machine once that took around 28 hours to defrag. If I had known it would have taken that long, I would have connected the drive to my bench machine.

 

[brandonkick]

How about this lovely little gem I got in a while back. Customer couldnt understand why it was so slow and having issues...

I hooked the drive up to a donar system and defragged it with a 3rd party util. Forget which one right now.


coffee

Sure its fragmented to all hell, but I do remember machines running INCREDIBLY slow when they get that low on free hard disk space.

 

[frederick]

Ive seen hard drives down to MBs. 500GB hdd, and it had 12MB free. My solution, either start deleting or get a bigger drive. What did they do? Buy a new computer.and do it again...

 

[CLC]

I ended up copying about 60 gigs of files to my external usb and then running the defrag which made the process about 4 times faster. It originally didn't have the 15% recommended free space. I had to actually run defrag more than once to get it to completely defrag which seemed rather odd to me. Then again I've never seen a drive that bad before. Believe it or not smart defrag from iobit did the best job??

 

[coffee]

Sure its fragmented to all hell, but I do remember machines running INCREDIBLY slow when they get that low on free hard disk space.

Yes, The other part of the equation was that I could not just defrag it because the hard drive was full. Thats why it went to a donor machine.

Its ironic, Microsoft brings you a new desktop but still has not solved their fragmenting issue with there filesystem.


coffee

 

[Altster]

Personally, I try not to let any computers hard drive free space drop below 25%. I always thought that that was the magical number - no less!

 

[frederick]

Personally, I try not to let any computers hard drive free space drop below 25%. I always thought that that was the magical number - no less!

quite right sir. The magical number should be around 30-40% in my most honest opinion. I try to push people away from getting anything larger than 500GB in their computer, and instead get a 1 or 2 TB external. When they ask me why, I tell them performance, and then start using car analogies. They comprehend what I say, and tell me to do it up

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Personally, I try not to let any computers hard drive free space drop below 25%. I always thought that that was the magical number - no less!

The rule of thumb was don't get it get beyond 85% full or slowdown will occur, (or to look at it the other way, keep more than 15% freespace).

I'm sure some people insist on more....25%...50%....but back in the day Microsoft taught us the 85% rule.

 

[brandonkick]

It's been my experience that once you dip down to 15% or so, the machine slows down.

I accidentally took my machine down to like 4 or 5% free space once and the subsequent boot time went to over twenty min. Got that number back up around 20% and the machine worked just fine!