Speed up Defragment?

BennyCats

BennyCats

Member
What is the expected time length for game files to defragment? Every few games I add to my external hard drive is fragmented so I defragment each time taking approximately 4 hours for one file with very few fragments. Could this be harming the drive? Sorry if answer is somewhere else most of what I have seen refers to OS defrag.

Drive is 1TB Seagate STEA1000400
Defrag using Auslogics Disk Defrag 10
Only 50gb being used on the drive
Drive health is good with all smart statuses as always passes or value is normal.
 
If you add games to external on a pc one solution could be Diskeeper, if you can get licence for it still from somewhere. It defrags on the fly and iirc it can be enabled for USB storage as well.

Company doing diskeeper has now a new product replacing it dymaxio, with only monthly licensing option available which is kinda meh. Been very happy Diskeeper user for about 10 or so years myself.
 
The STEA1000400 is an external drive USB3 meaning the maximum speed is about 130 MB/s. Unless you have it plugged into a USB2 port, then you max out at 33 MB/s. Using Windows would add more overhead (aka slow it down).
Suggestion - get an SSD even if it is external. It will always perform optimally and needs no defragmenting.
Even if a file shows it is fragmented like Swiss cheese, SSD can call any sector immediately because there is no READ head that needs to seek back and forth like in a HDD. This is what is making your game slow and needing to defrag
Think of an SSD as an external ram drive
If you get an internal SSD for you computer, you can expect a min of 250 MB/s if you have SATA3 and up to 500 MB/s with SATA6 and if you have a much newer PC/Laptop with NVME, you can get up to 3500 MB/s
 
Atari800 said:
The STEA1000400 is an external drive USB3 meaning the maximum speed is about 130 MB/s. Unless you have it plugged into a USB2 port, then you max out at 33 MB/s. Using Windows would add more overhead (aka slow it down).
Suggestion - get an SSD even if it is external. It will always perform optimally and needs no defragmenting.
Even if a file shows it is fragmented like Swiss cheese, SSD can call any sector immediately because there is no READ head that needs to seek back and forth like in a HDD. This is what is making your game slow and needing to defrag
Think of an SSD as an external ram drive
If you get an internal SSD for you computer, you can expect a min of 250 MB/s if you have SATA3 and up to 500 MB/s with SATA6 and if you have a much newer PC/Laptop with NVME, you can get up to 3500 MB/s
Click to expand...
Thank you for this thorough explanation. I am using USB2 which explains a lot. I have seen plenty of comments about transferring file(s) to smaller space outlet like USB, defragmenting and transferring back over to HDD but not ever sure it would make a difference or make sense. Don't want to read/write too much so will look into USB1/thunderbolt/SSD
 
Lwiz said:
If you add games to external on a pc one solution could be Diskeeper, if you can get licence for it still from somewhere. It defrags on the fly and iirc it can be enabled for USB storage as well.

Company doing diskeeper has now a new product replacing it dymaxio, with only monthly licensing option available which is kinda meh. Been very happy Diskeeper user for about 10 or so years myself.
Click to expand...
Thanks I'll look into this
 
BennyCats said:
Thanks I'll look into this
Click to expand...

If you find diskeeper, you'll have to do one defragging pass with it (it does better job than the one built in windows though.) After that if you'll let it run in the background all the time and setup the PS2 external as automatically defragged no further defrag passes are usually needed at all. Also the last versions can do SSD "grooming" on the fly as well.
 
Atari800 said:
Suggestion - get an SSD even if it is external. It will always perform optimally and needs no defragmenting.
Even if a file shows it is fragmented like Swiss cheese, SSD can call any sector immediately because there is no READ head that needs to seek back and forth like in a HDD. This is what is making your game slow and needing to defrag
Click to expand...

This is true in general, but not true for using it with OPL. Even an SSD has to be defragmented for games to work with OPL. It's due to how OPL reads from the HDD. OPL doesn't access it as a filesystem, but directly asks for sectors, so the sectors have to be next to each other (i.e. defragmented) or it won't work.
 
If the files are GIGANTIC ISO files (4 GB), they would be read and not written to.
So the only thing I can see causing something to defrag over and over and over is if it is looking at last access date.
The defragger may "think" this is important as the file was used RECENTLY versus the others.
Unless you see a night-n-day performance boost on defragging - let it be.
Also (from OPL info):
Works with HDD, USB, ETH (SMB), and MC.

You might want to kick around the idea of taking drive, putting it on your PC and network to it.
A) If your PC has USB3, boost in speed
B) If you have SLIM PS2, network built in - not sure of speed thou .. possibly faster then USB2
C) If you are tech savvy enough, and make a linux box to serve the SMB, max out the disk cache so whatever it calls from the CD may already be in ram and sends that instead of seeking on the disk

Just some thoughts
 
Larger files are mostly my issue as expected. I have noticed frequent fragmentation errors with .iso files over 4gb than have been split with USBUtil to fit FAT32 format which I understand can be slower to defrag. SMB idea sounds good and from what I know is a popular method although I think personally I would rather run PCSX2. Also worth noting my tests using USB3 port (labeled SS) were not much faster. Is there a way of trying to narrow the gap between sectors of an added file before I place on HDD and have to defrag? Sorry not too informed on this matter.

Main concerns are if there is much I can do about the time elapsed and if the drive can be damaged. I have added the report from my last Defragment below which includes a file that failed to defrag (included 10 fragments). Total size of all files included in defragment were 10.54 GB. If there is anything out of the ordinary please chime in


Disk Size: 931.28 GB
Free Space Size: 886.25 GB
Clusters: 30516325
Sectors per Cluster: 64
Bytes Per Sector: 512
Elapsed Time: 09:09:28
Total Files: 150
Total Directories: 13
Fragmented Files: 3
Defragmented Files: 2
Optimised Files: 2
Skipped Files: 1
Fragmentation Before: 23.41
Fragmentation After: 8.16
 
do not tell auslogics to defrag the free space...that can cause the moving around of large files that are already defragmented.

also, you can have it defrag just one file. so you can copy a large file then defrag just that file.
 
Just defrag once as ISO's (CD BD images) do not get modified and won't get fragmented.
If this drive is just reading ISO's and ROMS, and no updating files - you aren't gaining any benefit.
Your defragger is probably looking at LAST ACCESS date and moving those files to the front, considering them "important"
 
Coro said:
do not tell auslogics to defrag the free space...that can cause the moving around of large files that are already defragmented.

also, you can have it defrag just one file. so you can copy a large file then defrag just that file.
Click to expand...
Good tip, I have made sure this is what I'm doing. Attempted a single file defrag through Defraggler with Action > Defrag File... and just stays at 0% even for a 1gb split file. I have also attempted to copy the files, Defrag and place back to HDD with no luck. Thanks though

Atari800 said:
Just defrag once as ISO's (CD BD images) do not get modified and won't get fragmented.
If this drive is just reading ISO's and ROMS, and no updating files - you aren't gaining any benefit.
Your defragger is probably looking at LAST ACCESS date and moving those files to the front, considering them "important"
Click to expand...
Good advice although I wouldn't want to end up having half of the files on my HDD fragmented and unusable then having to keep my pc on for prolonged time to complete. With more then likely some failed Defragmentation
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Oh I thought this was external usb for games storage (just ISO's and maybe roms).
*like 99% readonly and 1% write maybe

Fragmented files will always be usable
Defragger should never fail (unless you have no room to move files around)

If you are talking about installing a some game on the USB that makes directories with a ton of files that get updated, your not going to defeat it getting fragmented running with windows.

If this is the case, maybe break your usb into 2 partitions (D and E drives) and put ISO's and ROMS (things that don't get updated but added to) in drive E and games that require installation into D. Then you only need to defrag the smaller D drive which won't take as long as it is not juggling the massive ISO files
However running games installed on to a USB2 drive is crazy (IMO)
 
Too bad OPL doesn't support NTFS. Not only for the 4GB file size restriction, but also because defragmentation is faster.

I didn't know this until I defragmented my PS3 games on my USB drive. Yes, I know it isn't required but I prefer the files to be defragmented anyway.
 
Thinking out loud. Definitely a space problem as defragmenting same 1gb file on 4GB USB takes about 15 minutes as opposed to ballpark 2-3 hours on HDD. Strange issue to have considering age/space/fragment%

I have read Antivirus may be interrupting? Currently running AVG. Seen theories that more use of Defrag program translates to quicker Defrag although that seems a bit voodoo.

Have hit a bit of a brick wall tbh, research has failed to find an identical problem but mainly issues with drives that are close to being full.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Back
Top