Defragging your hard drive.

[dale0404 5]

Hi all,

Quick question for all you technophobes out there.

I am using defraggler to defrag my hard drive. Now in light of the Devs posting that it is a good idea to defrag your hard drive after the release of A3, what defrag tools does the community use and why?

Please post about paid and free applications.

[doveman 7]

Hi all,

Quick question for all you technophobes out there.

I am using defraggler to defrag my hard drive. Now in light of the Devs posting that it is a good idea to defrag your hard drive after the release of A3, what defrag tools does the community use and why?

Please post about paid and free applications.

Whilst I doubt it makes any difference what you use for defragging ArmA itself, as defragged is defragged at the end of the day, when I was analysing and fixing/improving my Windows boot times I was advised to only use the built-in Windows defrag as the third-party tools all use different methods which could mess with the Windows prefetch, etc and so might result in slower boots than just using the Windows defrag.

If you're using a SSD though, boot times aren't going to be an issue anyway.

[jblackrupert 14]

Defraggler has worked well in the past for me but I switched to intalling Arma on SSD which you do not need to defrag.

Arma is a whole new experience running on SSD. Worth the investment.

Edited September 14, 2013 by jblackrupert

[3instein 10]

One question if you please.I defrag my comp just about on a daily basis as I have a lot of stuff I D/L then delete, etc.

Does it make any difference how often I do this, meaning if I defrag daily, does it do any harm?

Regards in advance,

Mick. :)

Edit: I use Auslogics Disk Defrag for this which seems to do the trick. :)

[nikiforos 450]

Actually I would like to recommend Gamebooster. It allows you to defrag specific game categories instead of defragging the whole computer. Much faster and easy .

[Sealife 22]

Windows 8 does it constantly so as long as you set it so its not deaf ragging during Arma games all is good :)

[suprememodder 11]

i just bought a 256gb ssd. tired of messing around with all this defrag crap.

[dmarkwick 261]

I use Ultimate Defrag, it's a commercial product so you need to pay for it :)

Among other features, it allows me to specify that PBO files all be placed together, on the outermost track of the hard drive partition. This means faster read times as obviously the outermost tracks of the outermost partition will be moving the fastest.

[Furret 0]

Uh, don't defragment SSD drives. It'll lower its lifespan significantly as well as being completely unnecessary.

[RuecanOnRails 10]

O & O Defrag.

Works well for my needs. After setting it up and keeping in the background, it will keep your files in one piece. I use an SSD for primary which never needs to be defragged, my storage drives rarely need any maintenance.

If you're looking to squeeze out better performance and less noticeable LOD switching. Consider getting a SSD, then set up symbolic links, and ramdisk for extra points. Keep the entire game on the SSD, then place a couple of the most read files into a ramdisk using symbolic links. The amount of files you place into ramdisk will greatly depend how much ram you have to spare.

[call_911 10]

Was considering purchasing an SSD an the computer guy at the store I goto for tech stuff said that I would have to run windows on the SSD versus using it for gaming only, hence negating the purpose of purchasing. Is that true? Or is this guy...cheers. Defraggin wise i've alway just done a anylise disk like every 1-2 weeks. just dl'd Defraggler though so may test.

[tonygrunt 10]

Was considering purchasing an SSD an the computer guy at the store I goto for tech stuff said that I would have to run windows on the SSD versus using it for gaming only, hence negating the purpose of purchasing. Is that true? Or is this guy...cheers. Defraggin wise i've alway just done a anylise disk like every 1-2 weeks. just dl'd Defraggler though so may test.

The only reason that you would have to absolutely put windows on the SSD is if you have only 1 sata connector on your PC/Laptop and you can't connect a 2nd drive. There is no reason that you can't have windows on a HDD and whatever you want on a SSD, it's just that putting the OS on a SSD you will get a general performance boost on your PC and that's why it's advised to do so.

[ck-claw 1]

I use Ultimate Defrag, it's a commercial product so you need to pay for it :)

Among other features, it allows me to specify that PBO files all be placed together, on the outermost track of the hard drive partition. This means faster read times as obviously the outermost tracks of the outermost partition will be moving the fastest.

I also use Ultimate Defrag to place Arma on the outer tracks- seems to have served me well through the Arma series with my very average pc.

[nikiforos 450]

I have both OS and Arma 3 on my SSD. Is that a problem? I feel it works well for me.

[RuecanOnRails 10]

Was considering purchasing an SSD an the computer guy at the store I goto for tech stuff said that I would have to run windows on the SSD versus using it for gaming only, hence negating the purpose of purchasing. Is that true? Or is this guy...cheers. Defraggin wise i've alway just done a anylise disk like every 1-2 weeks. just dl'd Defraggler though so may test.

Yes you put the OS on the SSD and not really anything else other than a few things you want speeded up. In general SSD's have a much smaller capacity which it why you want to keep only high priority things on them. Using symbolic links, you can easily keep everything installed on a storage HDD, then move them to the SSD when you want to speed them up and link them back to their install directory using symbolic links.

In other words an SSD will greatly improve your overall experience both with the OS, and with anything installed on the SSD.

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html

[David77 10]

Hi all,

Quick question for all you technophobes out there.

I am using defraggler to defrag my hard drive. Now in light of the Devs posting that it is a good idea to defrag your hard drive after the release of A3, what defrag tools does the community use and why?

Please post about paid and free applications.

If you're using a normal HDD, just use the default windows defrag. Analyze your drive. If it isn't atleast 10% fragmented, then leave it be. If you analyze the drive and it's 10%+ then defrag your drive. How & when to defrag can be seen in the "Tell me more about disk defragmenter" link when you open the disk defragmenter.

If you have a solid state drive DO NOT defrag the drive.

On that note, I have some questions of my own =P. Have SSD's improved over the last year or so? I remember doing some research when I built my current PC, and alot claimed that SSD's weren't optimal yet. That they have issues.

Edited September 16, 2013 by David77

[tonygrunt 10]

..................

On that note, I have some questions of my own =P. Have SSD's improved over the last year or so? I remember doing some research when I built my current PC, and alot claimed that SSD's weren't optimal yet. That they have issues.

SSSs improvement is reaching a deadpoint if not already reached. They reached SATA 3 speed limits and the only thing they can improve is IOPS and capacity vs price.

As for issues the only real ones I had with SSDs was with the 1st generation ones prior 2009 which have unresolved performance problems when used with a large write activity (used as an os drive, large file copies). The standard problems SSDs have are:

- Life of the SSD reducing due to writes. You shouldn't have a problem if your OS & drivers support trim, you keep your drive at maximum 80% full and you don't write terabytes and terabytes per day. I am still using my 2 Vertex 120GB (from 2009) in my pc and it seems that I will have to throw them away before they run out of life.

- Performance. You might not get the full performance of the SSD due to the sata controller. Rule of thumb, newer is better and Intel is better than AMD with 3rd party controllers coming last (does not apply for dedicated raid chips).

- Crashes. Most SSDs come problem free but there might be still bugs which usually are fixed (firmware updates). Sometimes a SSD might not work due to a poor sata cable or a sata backplane/tray.

- SSD Price vs capacity. Not much to say but prices of SSDs keep dropping.

[maddogx 13]

what defrag tools does the community use and why?

My main gaming rig has an SSD, but on my second PC I use Contig. It's a free command line tool that allows you to defrag individual folders. :)

[Greenfist 1863]

Isn't there a built-in defrag system in Steam? I haven't had a single fragment in Arma.

I'm using Defraggler occasionally but it seems to mess up windows own scheduled defrag so it doesn't run at all automatically.

[tonygrunt 10]

Isn't there a built-in defrag system in Steam? I haven't had a single fragment in Arma.

I'm using Defraggler occasionally but it seems to mess up windows own scheduled defrag so it doesn't run at all automatically.

AFAIK there is no built-in defrag in Steam. You might confuse it with the option to "Defragment Cache Files" which is used only for the games using the old content system that would defrag the files inside the .gcf container format.

[Kally Cissel 0]

How often can I defragment my HDD after it has been accidentally repaired, and will an SSD help me?

[honger 115]

11 hours ago, Kally Cissel said:

How often can I defragment my HDD after it has been accidentally repaired, and will an SSD help me?

SSD is always better than HDD in terms of gaming and overall process speed, and they are still really cheap so its worth switching unless you don't mind long loading times and stutters due to loading some textures ad hoc.

 

The rule about defragging drives I've learnt a dozen years ago is that whenever the fragmentation reaches more than 10% you can start thinking about defragmentation, with smaller numbers it may just not help you at all.

[Micky Nub 6]

My understanding is that mechanical drives will sloooww down when approimately 75% full.