Help: why is my defrag taking so long??

Just got my brand new 5680 and wanted to defrag my c: drive. (Removed virtual memory since I have 2GB ram.)

The Windows utility show a lot defragged files & I tried defrag a couple of times but gave up after few hours when its still at less than 50% complete.

Why is it taking so long? Should I run it in safe mode?

I'm running MCE 2005, c: drive is FAT32, converted my d: drive to NTFS w/4K clusters but only interested in defragging c:.

 

What size is your c drive? Defrag takes a LONG time. Unless it's empty.

And what is the % of it thats full? What RPM drive do you have?

And you're not trying to use it while it's defragging right? You have ALL programs shut down that are possible?

 

Thanks for the suggestions...

The c: drive is 72GB with about 20GB used. I've run defrag until its about 30% done after 2 hours. The drive is 5400RPM.

I don't use it and shut down everything except what's in my system tray: Norton Antivirus, Bluetooth, Synaptics Touchpad, and my network connections.

I know in the past (with previous computers) I used to have problems whereby the defrag would restart and I had to disable Norton. This is why I asked if I should run it in safe mode.

 

From experience I find that the default Windows defragmentation utility is alot slower, you might be better off using other programs such as Diskeeper or PerfectDisk.

Also you should check the IDE settings. See what UDMA mode you are running in, and if your hard drive is in PIO mode then thats probably the reason why defrag is slow. Also check to see how many IDE channels you have, if you only have a primary IDE channel and have both hard drive and optical drive on it then thats another possibility.

 

If I recall wouldn't the fact that ACER typically has the drive as a FAT32 drive make Defrag a LOT slower (not saying you SHOULD change it, just as to why it might be slow).

 

It being FAT32 could be a factor, I have also noticed that with their laptops, but that was also when it only had a primary IDE channel with both the hard drive and the optical drive on it.

But also converting it to NTFS had no change in performance.

 

yeah mine is so slow, i still havent defragged it because i only have 4200 rpm, i tried and after 2 hours it was 7%

 

I defrag mine last nite, it took almost 8 hours, that is the way just let it defrag overnite

 

Well, I don't understand. I got my laptop, all about the same as all of yours and I think 2-3hours at the most.

 

Well part will also depend how fragged it is

 

OK, I checked the IDE controllers in my hardware devices and I have a primary & a secondary channel. The primary says its using Ultra DMA mode 5 and the secondary says Ultra DMA mode 2. Neither is using PIO. So I guess that's not the problem.

Funny thing is that my previous laptop was a pentium 3 (vs. my current Core 2 Duo) and the HD was 4200 RPM although half the size. Yet the defrag took less time even though there was much more data on it.

 

In my experience NTFS is much, much quicker to defragment than FAT32. I'm not sure why, but scouring Google I think it may be because:

> small files can be stored directly in the Master File Table making for better space utilisation; and/or
> FAT32 does not cluster metadata on the disk and it is typically scattered all over the volume.

Happy to be corrected if these points are incorrect, or if someone finds a clear description on the web.

 

rofl.......