Curse

Messiah O F Light · Mar 14, 2007, 01:24 AM // 01:24

what does defragmentation do to your hard drive? ive never done it before, but i heard it its good to do it once in a while. is it good to atleast do it once, or should it only be used if you have a certain problem with your pc?

October Jade · Mar 14, 2007, 01:37 AM // 01:37

You could think of your hard drive as a big series of pockets where data is stored. Unfortunately, computers don't always fill the pockets in succession; often they might place two pieces of the same file in different locations on the drive. What defragmentation does is try to clump the pieces back together by trading places with other data. If you're running Windows and you decide to run a defrag, you'll see pictorally what I'm talking about.

As for being necessary or not, I'm going to lean to the side of not. It certainly can't hurt, but if you're looking for noticeable improvement in your Guild Wars performance this isn't really the place to start.

p.s. To find the defrag, it's Start-->All Programs-->Accessories-->System Tools-->Disk Defragmenter. You should probably run Disk Cleanup first before trying a defragmentation.

DutchGun · Mar 14, 2007, 02:08 AM // 02:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Messiah O F Light

what does defragmentation do to your hard drive? ive never done it before, but i heard it its good to do it once in a while. is it good to atleast do it once, or should it only be used if you have a certain problem with your pc?

Just to clarify, defragmenting is not really "fixing" anything on your disk, as there's likely nothing broken. You can think of it as just re-organizing the drive to make things quicker to access from the disk, sort of how you might reorganize your closet. The same stuff is all there, but it's not a big jumbled mess now.

In particular, large files that change frequently are subject to heavy fragmentation. This means the GW .dat file is susceptible. After defragmenting the drive, you may notice that GW loads new areas a bit faster, etc.

Scandisk, on the other hand, should be run every once in a while to check for possible corrupt data on the drive. Go ahead and run scandisk to see if everything checks out ok, then run defrag afterwards.

tijo · Mar 14, 2007, 02:38 AM // 02:38

If you Gw.dat file is very fragmented, you'll notice an increase in loading time after defragmenting the file.

Note that the defragmenter that comes with windows might skip very large files to speed up the defragmenttion process. The sticky bad lagg, try this in the technician's corner main page gives you tips on how to defragment your Gw.dat file that are actually quite useful. It also gives you links to freewares that can allow to easily defragment your Gw.dat file.

Also consider getting diskeeper if you can since it's much better than the defragmenter that comes with windows. Well that's my own opinion and that of most of my friends.

Defragmenting is not necessary but it doesn't hurt to do it once in a while, it makes acessing files on your harddrive faster.

Messiah O F Light · Mar 14, 2007, 03:50 AM // 03:50

thanks for the help+info

Linda Heartilly · Mar 14, 2007, 07:51 AM // 07:51

It's like this, imagine a row of 10 blocks on your hard drive.
You write a file that occupies 2 blocks, then one that occupies 4 meaning that 1 to 6 are now in use.
You delete the first one and then try to write a file that occupies 5 blocks.
What happens is it fills the first two blocks but then there's another file in the way so the other 3 blocks are placed being it like such:

File 3, file 3, file 2, file 2, file 2, file 2, file 3, file 3, file 3

File 2 could be loaded in one physical drive IO operation, file 3 too in this case but not if there's a lot more in between which is usually the case (the 10-block HDD in this example has a little low capacity :P ).
Therefore, if data from the same files is all located in one place it's faster to load the file and defragmentation does just that.

It brings data back together, which got scattered due to reasons such as in the example situation above.
This isn't solved automatically whenever you create or delete files because that would require moving data all the time, generating a huge performance overhead.

N E D M · Mar 14, 2007, 08:05 AM // 08:05

/agree heartily.