Nice edit. I almost didnt catch it.

Wow my very own stalker. An illiterate one with outdated info but mine all mine.
Used to work tech support, used to.

What's up Ray. Just busting your balls.

Yeah I think I know who you are. Youre the guy that couldnt answer the questions from Howard Sterns Stripper Jeopardy right? You guessed we fought Russia in WW2?

Dont use my name either.

jolt -

ever try recording 12 channels of 24-bit/96k audio onto a fragmented hard drive?? it'll choke about 5 minutes into the recording. defrag, and everything will be fine.

Look can you please just let Jolt win. He has stats to back him up, you don't. I know you want to win, but from an outsiders point of view, if I was a judge Jolt is winning the case here.

Wheres the fun in that? This is one of those classic geek arguements that really depends on your definition of performance. We can go over to the PC Forum and debate if its better to leave your PC on all the time or shut it down every night too.

Or better yet a Mac Vs Windows debate.

Stats, huh?

As we all know there are 3 types of statistics........unfortunately I can't remember the cliche now........doh : )

ed. NM, hmmm lies, damned lies, and statistics?

Anyway, if you don't want to believe that defragging helps then don't and never do it.

I mean, a lot of people argue that they can't tell the diff between 60 and 120 fps.........and there are tons of facts and reports supporting both.

I on the other hand, can tell immediately that defragging helps and I defrag multiple times a WEEK. The easiest way to see this is to combine apps, downloads, and games onto one hd. Constantly move files (delete, dload, install) and notice when you load a game, it starts to slow down. THEN, defrag and see what it does.......

And for anyone taking 8hrs or something with Defrag, it's because they're using MS Defrag. You could have a 99% defragged 5GB HD and still take an honor to get that last 1% done with MS Defrag.

No good (Norton or Diskeeper) would take that long unless maybe it's a 200GB HD that goes years without a defrag and constant file shifting

Jolt can win anything he wants but he is still wrong about defragging. Reading something on a webpage and actual real world performance are two different things. Your placebo comment is just childish. The reason I don't need a help desk person or a benchmark is that I deal with this every day and I know first hand that defragging works.

Here Jolt, since you need someone to give you stats.
These are from executive.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Test results clearly demonstrate that a defragmented system performs
significantly faster than a fragmented system. The NT 4.0 workstation
in Configuration #1, running Excel and Outlook, showed an average
increase in performance of 80.6% after defragmentation. Average
gains of 219.6% were produced on Windows 2000.
Similarly, for the NT 4.0 server in Configuration #1, running
Exchange and SQL Server 7.0, NSTL recorded an average increase in
performance of 56.1% after defragmentation. Average gains of 83.5%
were produced for Windows 2000.
The NT 4.0 workstation in Configuration #2, running Excel and
Outlook, showed an average increase in performance of 74.4%
after defragmentation. Average gains of 85.5% were produced on
Windows 2000.
The NT 4.0 server in Configuration #2, running Exchange and
SQL Server 7.0, ran, on average, 19.6% faster after defragmentation.
Average gains of 61.9% were produced for Windows 2000.
defragmented system performs
significantly faster than a fragmented
system.

This part of the thread about whether drive fragmentation affects performance really belongs in the PC forum. I suspect you'd get much more knowledgeable and authoritative responses there than here.

For people who want to determine for themselves what's true and what's not, this a very simple thing to test if you're running any Windows OS except for Me or XP. Simply get a stopwatch and time how long it takes you to boot both with your drive fragmented and right after a defrag.

For Win95, 98, NT, 2K, what most of you will find is that the more fragmented your HD, the slower your boot time. The difference will range from maybe a few seconds to maybe even over a minute depending on your particular HD's and the software installed.

I believe that by default, both Me and XP will basically defrag in the background as part of their "optimization" processes. I'm certain that they both do defrag as part of their feature that speeds up boot times.

It's also interesting to note that NT4 didn't ship with a defrag utility built into the OS because MS felt at the time that it wasn't needed. However, the marketplace saw fit to make Diskeeper, the first NTFS defag utility, a very popular tool. So much so, in fact, that MS ended up licensing the Diskeeper code and has now bundled it for use with Win2K and WinXP.

Odd that they'd go through the trouble and expense to do that and also make defrag a part of their "boot accelerator" feature if it's all just a big myth.

Anyway, for anyone who wants to learn for themselves how HD's work, here's an excellent place to start:

http://www.storagereview.com/welcome...ide_index.html

I guarantee that anyone who takes the trouble to read through that and understand it will come to see why defragging hard drives can often but not always make a significant performance difference. (how's that for straddling the fence )

BTW, of all the sites that have been linked so far, the only one that appears to be remotely credible is the Tomshardware link. And even there, you must keep in mind that Tom and his cohorts are German and English is not their first language. As a result, all too often, the things one reads on their site can be vague, confusing, and in cases like this, outright misleading.

Indeed, access time is not affected by fragmentation, but being a technical site, they're using access time in its strict technical definition which is average seek time plus average rotational latency. This is a very different thing from the general usage of "access time" which many people incorrectly assume somehow equates to "overall performance."

In reality, access time is just one factor that determines how fast a given disk subsystem is going to be. Another factor would be how fragmented that disk is. The two have nothing to do with one another, but together they will both factor into how fast a given file can be read from or written to.

It's not hard to say that loading a PC probably improves things a bit like belboz noted, however we are talking about the HD and the Xbox, not some PC with tons of applications loaded on it. Most of the Xbox HD is for MP3s and game saves. The part for loading games is small. Would an extremely fragmented HD load the levels on Halo slower than a brand new one? I honestly don't think so.

oh btw, i believe ntfs is alot less susceptible to fragmentation than fat

Sorry to go a little OT here but I've seen this a few times... Is there a way to play mp3s off the Xbox HDD? I have a bunch of cds ripped but it would be a lot easier (and faster) if there was a way to rip a cd full of mp3s to the HDD.

How much of the Xbox HD is allocated for games?


BTW jolt, I asked my coworker about the 8-hour defrag and he said that he didn't see it restarting and that scandisk hadn't found any bad sectors previously. He did say that while watching it defrag on "DETAILS" he noticed that most of the time it was only moving one block at a time. He's running 98se and I know how slow it defrags compared to Win Me. Hell with me defragging once every 2 weeks with Win98se it would take 2-3 hours, but when I upgraded to WinMe my defrag times went to just 20-30min.

NTFS gets fragmented just like fat. Windows NT is terrible. That is why M$ had to start shipping NT with Diskeeper lite.

No. You can only put in audio CDs and the Xbox will rip them to Windows Media Files. The Xbox does not play MP3s.

Thanks, that's what I thought. I imagine it'll happen sometime but I wasn't sure if anyone had figured out how to do it yet.