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Aptiva - Determining when to use DEFRAG
Applicable to: World-Wide
There is no hard and fast rule about when to run DEFRAG or how soon it will take to reach a fragmentation level when it would be worthwhile to continue with an optimization. It is usually recommended that DEFRAG be run once every week or two to determine the fragmentation level, possibly doing a file-only optimization if the unfragmented percentage drops below 97%. Doing so will not provide any noticeable gains in performance, however, unless the percentage drops below 93%.
If you are running DEFRAG and doing a full optimization every week, this may be due to a lack of free space on the drive. This may indicate that you need to consider adding another hard drive to handle the applications and files on your system, or you may need to start moving files to diskette or just deleting them to get more space. The fragmentation can rise rapidly if you don't have a lot of free space, as well as if you're running some heavy duty applications that do a lot of file manipulation and updating.
The following method may provide you with a means of determining how often to run the DEFRAG utility program.
1. Schedule a time once a week to run DEFRAG to check the unfragmented percentage that it calculates. Do not do any optimization at this time, however. Instead, record the date and the unfragmented percentage.
2. Over a period of 4-8 weeks, determine how long it takes to reach the 96% level and then how long it takes to get below 93%. Depending on the applications that you run and how you use your system, it may take less than 4 weeks or even more than 8 weeks to reach the 92% level. The purpose here is to determine a pattern of how you use the system and your applications.
3. When the unfragmented percentage finally drops below the 93% level, then do a full optimization and start recording the levels again. After a couple of months, you'll be able to chart an approximate interval when it would be necessary to do a full optimization and you can schedule that work to be done once a month or 6 weeks or whatever interval is indicated.
4. The time interval that it takes to reach a 96% level can be used as an interim point at which you might run DEFRAG to do a file-only optimization. A file-only optimization will run quickly, and the primary effect will be that it will take longer to reach the point where a full optimization is required. A file-only optimization will probably not show any improvement in general system performance, so skipping this optimization once in a while will not be a problem.
You may read or hear from time to time that other users are doing a full optimization once a week or once every two weeks, even though there are no indications that the optimization will provide any benefit. In older DOS versions, this strategy of optimizing (defragging) weekly made sense, because the algorithms used by DOS for allocating files were much less sophisticated than those in modern DOS versions.
Such habits are sometimes hard to break, so you may read or hear of other recommendations for when to optimize that are different than the times that you've charted. While these recommendations are well-intended, the conditions for those recommendations normally reflect how that person uses their own system and not how you use your system. The chart that you create with the method above will yield the best use of disk space, and thus provide you with the most efficient operation to suit the way you use your system.
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Hint Category |
DOS/Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Utility Software | |
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Date Created |
19-03-97 | |
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Last Updated |
09-03-99 | |
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Revision Date |
09-03-2000 | |
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Brand |
IBM Aptiva | |
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Product Family |
Aptiva, PS/1 | |
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Machine Type |
2134, 2136, 2137, 2138, 2140, 2142, 2144, 2159, 2161, 2162, 2168, 2176, 2011, 2121, 2123, 2133, 2155 | |
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all | |
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