Is 34 percent the hard disk fragmentation is much ? :-)

[Seret]

I've never understood the the idea of having a SSD just for the OS. How often do you load the OS? Once per boot.

The only OSes that run entirely from RAM are those specifically designed to (normally just Linux live systems). Everything else writes to and reads from the disk a lot normal use. That in fact is a major source of the fragmentation you see on the more frag-prone filesystems.

SSDs do indeed speed up boot times, but they also speed up every other task that does any I/O, which in practice is pretty much everything.

[cantab]

I believe the drives are the element most holding back everyday use in my current PC. Either that or the encrypting file system.

But with 1.3 out of 1.5 TB used - and I've hit higher in the past and had to delete stuff to make space - an SSD-only system won't be economical, and putting the OS and software on an SSD won't help my files load more quickly.

Back to the original topic, yes 34% fragmentation is a lot. What's your total disk space usage? If you have very little free space, I believe that will slow down any defragmentation and make it hard to get good results. So it may be best to free up some space before the defrag, even if it's only temporary and you copy the files back aftewards.

[Seret]

If you have very little free space, I believe that will slow down any defragmentation and make it hard to get good results.

Correct, and worse than that it'll actually create fragmentation. Even filesystems that are normally not prone to noticeable fragmentation effects will start to frag up and degrade if you run the drive more than about 80% full. So even us permasmug Linux users can find their drive fragging up if they push it too hard.

[Nuke]

25% of your hard drive space is ballast.