As the article points out, windows automatically defrags every week.
But it won't defrag if there's less than 15% free space.
Unless you go in and edit the defrag task and add the "-f" parameter to "force" it to defrag.
My drive was always 90% or more full, I was always downloading files, and only deleting enough old files to make room for the new files I wanted to download.
With "-f", it would defrag each week, then get slower as the week went on, because the drive became fragmented again.
For that and another reason, I decided to set it to defrag daily.
Here's the other reason:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/197162/ntfs-performance-and-large-volumes-of-files-and-directories
<snip>
1. A folder stores the index information (links to child files & child folder) in an index file. This file will get very large when you have a lot of children. Note that it doesn't distinguish between a child that's a folder and a child that's a file. The only difference really is the content of that child is either the child's folder index or the child's file data. Note: I am simplifying this somewhat but this gets the point across.
2. The index file will get fragmented. When it gets too fragmented, you will be unable to add files to that folder. This is because there is a limit on the # of fragments that's allowed. It's by design. I've confirmed it with Microsoft in a support incident call. So although the theoretical limit to the number of files that you can have in a folder is several billions, good luck when you start hitting tens of million of files as you will hit the fragmentation limitation first.
3. It's not all bad however. You can use the tool: contig.exe to defragment this index. It will not reduce the size of the index (which can reach up to several Gigs for tens of million of files) but you can reduce the # of fragments. Note: The Disk Defragment tool will NOT defrag the folder's index. It will defrag file data. Only the contig.exe tool will defrag the index. FYI: You can also use that to defrag an individual file's data.
4. If you DO defrag, don't wait until you hit the max # of fragment limit. I have a folder where I cannot defrag because I've waited until it's too late. My next test is to try to move some files out of that folder into another folder to see if I could defrag it then. If this fails, then what I would have to do is 1) create a new folder. 2) move a batch of files to the new folder. 3) defrag the new folder. repeat #2 & #3 until this is done and then 4) remove the old folder and rename the new folder to match the old.
<snip>
Ok, I didn't have millions of files in any folder, but I realized that defrag doesn't defrag the indexes, so you want to avoid having them become fragmented. If an index is not fragmented, it only takes one seek to search it, but if it's in 5 fragments, it takes 5 seeks to search it, making your computer 5 times slower. So if your drive tends to get full like mine, it's best to defrag daily to avoid creating fragmented indexes.
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