Does Windows 7 automatically defrag?

[circusboy01]

I have windows 7 with a 1tb. harddrive , My friend just got windows 7 with a 1tb. harddrive. He's tickled pink about all the space he has, Says he'll probabvly never run out.I emailed and told him
that he probably wouldn't have to worry about defragging either. He emailed back and said he thought W-7 defrags automatically But I think the Hard drive space is just so big that you don't have to bother defraging. So which is it? You don't have to defrag, because the harddrive is so big , or because W-7 does it for you?

 

[Cobalt006]

No you should still defrag the hard drive. Win 7 will automatically defrag it self . You can set your own time by going into the disk defragment properties.

 

[learninmypc]

Ok & thanks for asking circusboy. I just looked at my settings & noticed its set to defrag every Wednesday @1am. Is that too often or ???

 

[gbhall]

Your original thought, that a very large drive does not become fragmented, is an easy conclusion to draw (but wrong ). You might expect that new stuff that needs to be written just keeps on going into fresh space, which would take ages to fill up before starting again at the bottom. Is that what you thought ? Unhappily stuff is being deleted as fast as it is being written (think of your Internet data cache of maybe thousands of browser pages and images).

But possibly due to historic reasons when hard drives were much less than 1% current sizes, that deleted space is reused before new space is taken up. Hence any particular area of the drive stores old stuff, and parts of new stuff that dont quite fit in a freshly deleted part and so becomes split into two parts or more. That is.....fragmented.

Your present defragmentation schedule is going to happen in the early hours of the night, and will wake up your PC to do it, and probably shut down itself afterward. If the idea of that disturbs you, a monthly schedule is perfectly adequate.

It can be educational to download an independant defragmenter such as auslogics https://www.techspot.com/downloads/3051-auslogics-disk-defrag.html and actually do it yourself from time to time when you can see how quickly defragmentation occurs.

 

[learninmypc]

Ok, my main question about defragging it is how often? Isn't once a week too often?

 

[DelJo63]

I do mine manually and ONLY when I perform MS Updates.

 

[learninmypc]

jobeard, do you use a 3rd party program?

 

[DelJo63]

Defraggler

 

[learninmypc]

Thanks jobeard, just got it.

 

[snoop600]

Windows 7 is supposed to ran the defrag automatically.

 

[learninmypc]

Defraggler

jobeard, approxmately how long might it take to defrag this

Just a ballpark figure.

 

[DelJo63]

As I prune all possible unnecessary startups and services, it may well be that setting the Disk Defragmenter Service to Manual
has produced the evidence I am reporting here - - but;

I have files dated back into 4/11/2012 which are fragmented, and as they are not in my list of import / performance files, I never
defrag them with Defraggler.

There is no scheduled defrag on my laptop and I would conclude:

a) the service is necessary *IF* Win/7 "automatically defrags"​

b) a schedule must be defined to get the automatic feature (but then it's truly not automatic is it)​

c) there's no free lunch - - nothing is automatic​

your results be vary highly

 

[DelJo63]

jobeard, approxmately how long might it take to defrag this

Just a ballpark figure.

sheez, I have no reasonable answer other than the S.A "as long as it takes".
It would take a detail analysis of number of files, total number of fragments to be relocate and the performance data for your HD+System.

Secondly, I would not have the option [x] Allow contents to be indexed, especially during a defrag.

 

[learninmypc]

Ok, thanks.