Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

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Executioner
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Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

Post by Executioner »

This is on my laptop. It runs automatically each Friday. My laptop has a SSD for drive C, and I have 2 regular hard drives for D (500gb) and E (1tb). My games that I play are on drive D and I noticed it was taking a lot longer to load than it did say 4 weeks ago. I ran Windows 10 defrag on drive D which is "optimize", and took less than 5 minutes to complete. It still felt sluggish. So I installed Defraggler to see what it would find, and sure enough, the drive was 40% fragmented. Took over 2 hours for it to complete.

I think the Windows 10 defrag for a SSD is fine because it runs the trim command, but for regular spinning hard drives, it sucks and does not de-fragment the drive correctly. Has anyone else noticed that? I'm also going to try the other free one Auslogics.
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FlyingPenguin
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Re: Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Well, to be fair, the Windows defrag has one setting, which is the fastest defrag possible: moving as few blocks as it has to to do it in the shortest time. The Windows defrag has never been very sophisticated.

I suspect that your drives are also getting sluggish from what Steve Gibson likes to call "Bit Rot". You probably had some old, weak sectors that haven't been overwritten in a long time and are getting harder to read. Running the more aggressive defrag in Defraggler re-wrote a lot more sectors, which refreshed them.

This is why I run Spinrite on any drive I can, once a year, to refresh them.

Had the same experience on my 2015 Surface Pro 3 tablet. It's been getting very sluggish, and I suspected the SSD needed a refresh pass. Sadly you can't run Spinrite on it because it's UEFI only with no legacy BIOS fallback (waiting impatiently for Spinrite 7!!!), so I did the same as you. Downloaded the Auslogics defragger I think it was, and ran that on an aggressive relocation mode. Being SSD aware, it warned me several times I shouldn't be doing this to an SSD, but after running for an hour, the tablet runs like it's brand new.
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Executioner
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Re: Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

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Yeah believe it or not, I actually defragged my SSD on my windows 7 rig. Runs a lot better. That SSD has been in there for at least 3 years or so.

So when is Spinrite 7 going to be released??? I've been waiting for it for years. Can't find anything on his site as to the status.
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Executioner
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Re: Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

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Also, I was going to install Auslogic defrag, but it contains a few PUPs. It was flagged by Malwarebytes.
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FlyingPenguin
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Re: Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Defraggler is fine. It's been around forever. I think maybe I used the free trial of O & O. Defrag. Not sure.

Progress report on his forums here: https://forums.grc.com/threads/tracking ... gress.104/

Roadmap document here: https://www.grc.com/miscfiles/GRC-Devel ... oadmap.pdf

He just got married so he might be out of the loop for a couple of weeks. :)

6.1 will be released first. Much MUCH faster, able to handle larger drives, but no UEFI, NVME or USB support (I think) until 7.0
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Executioner
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Re: Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

Post by Executioner »

Thanks for those links. So his last reply was in March so hopefully he's close to 6.1 being final.
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Re: Defrag in Windows 10 sucks

Post by Losbot »

Executioner wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 6:28 pm Also, I was going to install Auslogic defrag, but it contains a few PUPs. It was flagged by Malwarebytes.
Should be fine to exempt that folder. I did that. I just installed Auslogics as well. I hadn't used it in ages. I should run it on all the drives of my gaming rig.
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