Is it worth defragging the hard drive?

[EASY PETE]

Im at 4% fragmentation, will it be worth it because PC has been slugging these past months

[Omega]

Windows will defrag automatically.

[EASY PETE]

That feature has been turned off it says

[Cloudy]

Your PC being sluggish may be due to a virus or malware... If I were you I'd take the time to backup important files and reinstall the OS. Maybe also consider getting an SSD instead of a HDD if you don't have one already.

[EASY PETE]

No viruses either, scanned with Norton and malware bytes

[_I_]

its fine
if its a ssd, it will make no difference, only wear down the drive slightly when you defrag
hdd/sshd will improve reading files that are not fragmented

sluggish drive can be it failing or other rproblems

check with hdtune or other drive test to check read/write speed, and smart table data
above 0 for pending, bad sectors means its going bad and needs to be replaced soon

[EASY PETE]

Or i could be mistaking it for another problem, sorting files and opening programs is ok, games seem to be a bit bad recently, for example hitman 2, black ops 4 etc have had bad fps and i have a nvidia 980ti which should run them good

[BloodShed]

Originally posted by _I_:

its fine
if its a ssd, it will make no difference, only wear down the drive slightly when you defrag
....

Windows won't defrag SSD drives.
It will run the trim command instead.

[vadim]

Originally posted by _I_:

if its a ssd, it will make no difference, only wear down the drive slightly when you defrag
hdd/sshd will improve reading files that are not fragmented

Obviously it MAKES difference. Files which located in a sequential or adjacent LBA can be read faster.

[EASY PETE]

It's a hard drive

[Snow]

Originally posted by SnarlyTrain:

It's a hard drive

Kinda surprised me too, you've said it's a hard drive in the title, why would anyone say SSD then?
Long version short - sure, it's worth defragging.
Now, I take defrag seriously, as I often deal with used parts, including HDDs. 4% defrag might not be a big deal, but there's a catch. If there's a particular software having its files all across the drive - those files might be not fragmented, but this software's files still are, as drive still has to get here, and there, and oooover there again and again whenever it needs its files. I deal with this using two different options with the same goal. The first one is sorting files by name and path. This way particular software always has got its files close to each other, and when there are a lot - this can save a little bit of time. The second option is keeping particular software's files close to each other by moving those to outer ring of HDD. In Disktrix UltimateDefrag this option is called "Performance", and that's what I do with my most-used games. From what I understand, outer ring of the hard drive is longer than inner one, it's got a disk shape, so with the same speed reading head manages to read more sequential info than it would in inner ring. This definitely helps with big files like those found in modern games, but then random small files reads are just slightly better in inner ring, as due to way less space in inner rings reading head can travel the distance needed to reach another file faster.
I've done a little reading benchmark[imgur.com] just now to see if I'm not completely insane, showing results I've just said. The C partition is in outer ring of my drive, and the E is in inner one, both ~200GB, separated by a big D between, it's 2TB drive. Also pay attention to the enormous speed difference between Q32T1 sequential and Q32T1 randoms - it's kinda the reason why SSDs work way faster, as they don't have any reading head which takes it time to move somewhere for random reads, and also the reason I try to keep particular software's files close to each other.

[_I_]

Originally posted by vadim:

Originally posted by _I_:

if its a ssd, it will make no difference, only wear down the drive slightly when you defrag
hdd/sshd will improve reading files that are not fragmented

Obviously it MAKES difference. Files which located in a sequential or adjacent LBA can be read faster.

you can force windows to defrag a ssd

ssd can access all sectors with the same delays, order makes no diff

hdd, small files will be faster if they are located closer to the read heads park position
large files will be faster if they are near the outer rim of a platter

but hdds often fill up from outer to inner, outer has the higher surfsce speed, but it parks near the spindle (lower surface speed but less heat generated)

if you can get a list of the files that are fragmented, you can see if its worth doing or not
or just do it and let it go overnight

windows had a bug where it would show some hdds as ssd and not schedule defrag for it

[rotNdude]

Running low on available drive space could also be an issue. What size is the drive and how much free space is on it?

[vadim]

Originally posted by _I_:

ssd can access all sectors with the same delays, order makes no diff

This is absolutely not true. You can compare SSD with RAM. The access time to a cell of RAM essentially depends on its address.
Of course, this is a very rough analogy, but the principle is the same - to read an arbitrary cell, you need to read a few more to find out exactly where it is located.
The situation with random write operations is much worse.

[Omega]

Originally posted by vadim:

Originally posted by _I_:

ssd can access all sectors with the same delays, order makes no diff

This is absolutely not true. You can compare SSD with RAM. The access time to a cell of RAM essentially depends on its address.
Of course, this is a very rough analogy, but the principle is the same - to read an arbitrary cell, you need to read a few more to find out exactly where it is located.
The situation with random write operations is much worse.

I am pretty sure wear leveling and other tricks these SSDs use will interfere with your attempts to defrag it.

There might be some miniscure amount of performance to be won but it's not worth it. I am not even sure if periodically running a full TRIMMing an SSD is worth it, unless of course you are doing a ton of writing to the disk with applications which really profit from the faster write times.

[vadim]

Originally posted by Omega:

I am pretty sure wear leveling and other tricks these SSDs use will interfere with your attempts to defrag it.

I think the same. But I didn't tell anything about defragmenting. I said only that SSD performance decreases with time as the growth of different types of fragmentation.
Including fragmentation within the physical block, which entails the so-called write amplification.

Let's look at Intel site: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/consumer-ssds/545s-series/545s-256gb-2-5inch-6gbps-3d2.html
Search for "performance" and press "info" hyperlink.
"Sequential Read - Speed with which the device is able to retrieve data that forms one contiguous, ordered block of data".
If the access time was not dependent on the page address, there would be no need to separately measure the sequential time, right?
Let's look further:
"Random Read (8GB Span) - Speed with which the SSD is able to retrieve data from arbitrary locations in the memory, within 8GB of LBA (Logical Block Address) range on the drive."
Have you noticed that to achieve maximum reading speed, it is also necessary that the addresses of logical blocks are in the specified range?
Why? Yes, for the simple reason - solid-state drives are not direct write devices, but an associative. And in this SSD one physical block of L2P table (logical to physical table that is a part of FTL layer of SSD firmware) contains exactly 8GB of LBA.