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How do I "Defrag" my Hard Drive - Dell XPS 8900?
I've heard it is good to defragment your hard drive, especially for the flight simming that I use my machine for.
But my machine has a SSD for caching fed by a regular hard drive - and the normal defrag utility won't let you at this "hidden" traditional drive.
Is there a way to safely defrag my actual behind the scenes hard drive?
Thanks,
Steve
RoHe
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August 10th, 2016 12:00
Are you specifying the drive when you run defrag?
Try running defrag from a CMD window. At the prompt, first type in:
defrag C: -a
press
That will give a report about how fragmented the drive is. If you decide it needs defragging, type in;
defrag C:
press
And you can type in defrag C: /? to see a list of all the available "switches" available for defrag.
RoHe
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August 8th, 2016 14:00
Don't worry about it. The cache SSD is small and used only to store files that Windows needs in a hurry or when memory (RAM) gets full.
Probably gets rewritten frequently, so unlikely to affect performance, even if it ever got fragmented.
If it ain't broke, don't break it!
milwaukeeroad
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August 8th, 2016 20:00
I'm sorry, I meant how do I defrag the large 2TB old fashioned hard drive that is behind the scenes, not the small SSD? Surely it can get fragmented, like any other hard drive?
TheRoots
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August 9th, 2016 12:00
I had the same question/problem. I appears as though the MS Windows 10 Defrag utility sees the 2tb Toshiba HDD as a SSD, even though the SSD is a 32gb cache in the M.2 slot. The MS Defrag utility won't even try to Defrag the 2tb Toshiba Drive (C:) because it says it is a SSD. Yes, in my case at least, the 2tb HDD drive is the boot drive.
RoHe
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August 9th, 2016 12:00
What version of Windows?
I don't know why you say the defrag utility won't let you defrag the 2 TB HDD. Are you using the utility built into Windows? And is the 2 TB drive your boot HDD?
Are you logged in with an account having administrator privileges? Have you tried booting in Safe Mode to run the defrag?
There are also free defrag utilities available on the net. If you decide to use one of those, make sure you download it from a reputable site so you don't get any malware, and pay attention to the installation process so you don't let any unwanted junkware get installed along with the defragger.
RoHe
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August 9th, 2016 13:00
I did a quick Google, and it appears this is a problem with the Win 10 defragger because the hard drive is set up as RAID array with the cache SSD.
Guess your only solution is to use a 3rd party defragger, subject to the caveats in my previous post, at least until MS fixes this problem.
Meanwhile, I'll ping my Dell tech contacts for suggestions.
TheRoots
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August 10th, 2016 21:00
RoHe, when I've run the Windows Defrag app, I have specifically selected the C: drive, but the Analyze button and the Optimize button are greyed out. I tried running Defrag from a CMD window (you have to run as Administrator) and it does allow you to Defrag the drive that way. Thanks for your help.
RoHe
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August 11th, 2016 12:00
Glad doing it a CMD window worked.
Just make sure it's not defragging the SSD, which will shorten its useful life.