If you have lots of small files which were spread out all over the hardsisk it can take really long. How much empty space is left on the disk? If it's almost full it will take even longer. Jacco
I used to use Defraggler when I was running XP. It allows you to defrag specific files rather than the entire hard drive if you wish. I haven't used it since I've been using Windows 7 though and my hard drive is only 350GB.
Defraging is one of those sorta over hyped things that's *almost* an urban myth at this point. For an external drive, unless you're doing video editing or something else that's extremely I/O intensive, I think defragging is a waste of time. For a system drive that's really, really fragged, maybe. In the last 10 years I've run defrag less than I can count on one hand, and I can't remember a single instance in which it made a significant difference. Just my 2 cents. Dr. P
^^^ Exactly my thoughts about defragging. Is there something that is happening that made you think you needed to defrag, like general slowness or a "System Low on Resources" type warning? If so, it may be more of a RAM issue. Edited by - tug3005 on 1/9/2011 9:10:00 AM
It should take a long time if you have a bunch of pictures and you haven't defragged in a long time but 24 hours sounds like maybe something went wrong.
My esperiences with defragging is yea it is a waste of time, for some reason advocated in these magazines aimed at 'average' PC users: '10 ways to speed up your old shitty computer running a completely dilapidated Windows-installation'.
:-D Yeah, it's just faster to copy the contents to another disk/partition. format, and then copy everything back. To keep a fast windows (which i don't use for more than 4 years now), make sure you have a windows/program partition, with a small size (20-30GB), this will force you to only have shit on other partitions, which means less fragmentation on the windows partition, and much, much faster operating speed. (when compared to 400GB of windows+pictures+mp3+shit)
Auslogics Disk Defrag is my choice. Has a defrag or defrag and optimize option. When windows system defrag refused to work on old pc tried a few free defrag progs and this impressed with its speed. Available for download at cnet http://download.cnet.com/Auslogics-Disk-Defrag/3000-2094_4-10567503.html