Disk Defragmenters

[OVerLoRDI]

There are lots of special disk defragmenters floating around in the software world and they all claim to increase performance and stability greatly. Obviously they wont do any of those things greatly, but are they any better than the standar Windows XP defragger?

 

[nova2]

some are.

look at perfectdisk and diskeeper.
there are some others worth looking into, but I can't remember them offhand.

also, read this and smile:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481.aspx

 

[0roo0roo]

i dont notice, drives are pretty fast these days.

 

[Nothinman]

Defragmenting is largely worthless except for really large files that you need sequential and low latency access to like when editing audio/video files. Oddly somehow Windows does seem to demonstrate a performance difference after defragmentation, but since I don't use Windows any more I never did any real tests to figure out if it was a placebo or a real measurable difference.

 

[Schadenfroh]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=33&threadid=1755546&enterthread=y

 

[dBTelos]

The XP defragger is fine for most home users.

 

[thescreensavers]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Defragmenting is largely worthless except for really large files that you need sequential and low latency access to like when editing audio/video files. Oddly somehow Windows does seem to demonstrate a performance difference after defragmentation, but since I don't use Windows any more I never did any real tests to figure out if it was a placebo or a real measurable difference.

I BEG TO DIFFER.

So your telling me that all those times I defrag ppl comps and they go much faster is because of what. Defraging helps your boot time, time for accessing files, and file performances

 

[Nothinman]

So your telling me that all those times I defrag ppl comps and they go much faster is because of what. Defraging helps your boot time, time for accessing files, and file performances

As I said, in Windows' case it does seem to have some affect but I never took the time to measure it to find out how much was real and how much was placebo. And if you look at Windows boot optimizer thing it does, it intentionally fragments the boot files so that they're ordered in the way they're read on bootup. So instead of jumping from file to file like normal they're read sequentially, just one way fragmentation can actually help performance.

And "time for accessing files" and "file performances" are red herrings, there's no single gauge for measuring them because different apps have different access patterns. For instance opening an MP3 won't be affected by fragmentation because the rate the data has to be read is very slow and the player will buffer a bit of it to avoid skipping. And on the opposite side ripping the audio from an AVI file will see some slowdown from a heavily fragmented file since you're very I/O limited.

 

[flexy]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Defragmenting is largely worthless except for really large files that you need sequential and low latency access to like when editing audio/video files. Oddly somehow Windows does seem to demonstrate a performance difference after defragmentation, but since I don't use Windows any more I never did any real tests to figure out if it was a placebo or a real measurable difference.

this is like saying a "few" mhz does not really differ. It's the "small things" combined, which, as a whole, make a faster/snappier system.

Defragging certainly makes a difference. Maybe not the world...but game-engines profit from it.....many games have LAAAARGE files and it's certainly better if they're in one piece.

MFT and pagefile defragging certainly is a good thing too, laying out files in a useful matter so they're not all scattered around, eg. files needed for booting etc.

 

[KoolDrew]

Considering that Windows never reads or writes more than 64KB per buffer to the pagefile and almost never does so in sequential 64KB chunks, the pagefile would have to be extremely fragmented to cause any type of performance problems. No matter if the pagefile is fragmented or not, the head will be moving all over the place anyway.

 

[FreedomGUNDAM]

have used both perfectdisk and diskeeper. Both are excellent. Using perfectdisk right now and loving it.

 

[Nothinman]

this is like saying a "few" mhz does not really differ. It's the "small things" combined, which, as a whole, make a faster/snappier system.

My system is perfectly 'snappy' and I never defrag any of my filesystems.

MFT and pagefile defragging certainly is a good thing too, laying out files in a useful matter so they're not all scattered around, eg. files needed for booting etc.

That's complete BS. The pagefile is accessed completely randomly so even if it's contiguous it'll never be accessed sequentially for more than like 64K. Same thing for the MFT, it's an index of files on the system so the only way to get any amount of sequential access to the MFT would be to access the files on your system in the same order that they're stored in the MFT and I'd guess that you have a much better chance of winning the lottery than having that happen.

And boot files are something I mentioned that benefit from fragmentation. MS' boot optimizer thing (can't remember the name right now) analyzes the file access during bootup and intentionally fragments those files in a certain layout so that the reads end up being sequential. If the files were completely contiguous it would cause more seeking since none of them are sequentially for any significant amount.

And don't just post "But it feels snappier to me!", that's meaningless please post real numbers proving how much faster your system is after a defrag.