- Nov 25, 2012
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Does anyone have experience with diskeeper? Just got me a Samsung SSD 840 PRO, but are afraid the software will do no harm.
Does anyone have experience with diskeeper? Just got me a Samsung SSD 840 PRO, but are afraid the software will do no harm.
Scale-free graphs! I love those things! They are so informative!A vendor's test, without disclosure of exactly how the test operates is pretty useless, too.
NTFS is far from perfect, and Windows is far from perfect. But it's gotten better, and you generally don't have to worry.
Hell, I left my spinner for almost 4 months w/o a defrag (idle activity annoys me to no end), and I had only a handful of files flagged as problematic. I've even been lazily leaving it with only 5-10% free space.
Fragmentation, both in NV storage and RAM, is real, but the problem is that it is difficult to predict. There are strategies for minimizing it, and dealing it is after the fact, but it occurs like it does because the OS can't know what files will be edited, or how. Common patterns can be planned for (appending to the end, FI), but you really need to handle it after the fact, in most cases.
There are pathological cases. But, they are also corner cases. The common case is that it doesn't really matter.
Just use the drive, leave some free space, and don't fret over it. If it's 2% slower one day than it could have been if it had been defragged, are you even going to notice? Remember that you're using a drive that can handle IOPS in the tends of thousands--figure ~200 pure 4K random per screen refresh on a bad day (steady state, QD 1-2). Its ability to perform GC in a timely manner matters 100x more to performance than NTFS issues.
Scale-free graphs! I love those things! They are so informative!A vendor's test, without disclosure of exactly how the test operates is pretty useless, too.
NTFS is far from perfect, and Windows is far from perfect. But it's gotten better, and you generally don't have to worry.
Hell, I left my spinner for almost 4 months w/o a defrag (idle activity annoys me to no end), and I had only a handful of files flagged as problematic. I've even been lazily leaving it with only 5-10% free space.
Fragmentation, both in NV storage and RAM, is real, but the problem is that it is difficult to predict. There are strategies for minimizing it, and dealing it is after the fact, but it occurs like it does because the OS can't know what files will be edited, or how. Common patterns can be planned for (appending to the end, FI), but you really need to handle it after the fact, in most cases.
There are pathological cases. But, they are also corner cases. The common case is that it doesn't really matter.
Just use the drive, leave some free space, and don't fret over it. If it's 2% slower one day than it could have been if it had been defragged, are you even going to notice? Remember that you're using a drive that can handle IOPS in the tens of thousands--figure ~200 pure 4K random per screen refresh on a bad day (steady state, QD 1-2). Its ability to perform GC in a timely manner matters 100x more to performance than NTFS issues.
In the case that a file's size is unknown when it must be written, Windows indeed will basically not worry about where it puts it. However, for files, and appended data, of known size, that's not much of an issue, and it's fairly good about placing them mostly contiguously.
It's not that I don't use my computer, but that I have enough RAM that it rarely has to do any emergency I/O flushing, and I'm rarely writing streams of unknown size (OTOH, Linux FSes have to be good about fragmentation, because streams of unknown length are the norm).
I've seen what happens to PCs with Quicken and Drake, FI, and it's just D:. They're just evil, combined with NTFS/Windows. Many months ago, I set a client's computer to defrag nightly, just after the daily backup, because it just got so bad so quickly (when said client upgrades, they will get an SSD). I'm not denying that there are cases where it can help. Windows' internal tweaking for the initial I/O, and then the Windows defragger, are intended to be good enough solution to a wide enough audience, and also be as out of the way as possible. Some people won't give the defragger time to run, some people will outpace it...but others it's fine for, or they just don't need it much. It's quite possible to write GBs/day, and not have bad fragmentation in the first place, today, and light fragmentation performance is almost as good as contiguous, thanks to drive makers and MS having worked on it.
Does anyone have experience with diskeeper? Just got me a Samsung SSD 840 PRO, but are afraid the software will do no harm.
We have used Diskeeper since 2009 and been very satisfied with how it manages the defrag process. It clearly improves system performance.
We have had one setback with migration to Windows 8. Condusiv states that the product is "fully compliant" with Windows 8 Pro. We did not find that to be the case and spent three frustrating days following their helpdesk procedures. None worked. When we, in frustration, uninstalled our AV software completely and then reinstalled Diskeeper 12, all was fine. The software immediately began operation on what was a clean Windows 8 disk.
Our only problem now is to find an AV product that does not conflict. One of Condusiv's steps was to make certain that the AV/FW settings permitted Diskeeper to work without interference...which we had done without success. We are still attempting to pin down exactly what process in our AV application interferes with Diskeeper. When we discover it, we'll post.
It seems to help when dealing with extremely fragmented drives. My mom's computer had brutal hard drive lag until I installed Smart Defrag and had it defrag every time the computer went idle.Defragging is a waste of time, doing it on an SSD about 1000x more so.
Check out this INDEPENDENT 3rd-party testing - http://downloads.condusiv.com/pdf/OpenBench_Test-Report_Diskeeper-12.pdf
If you don't want to read through all of it, just check out page 17, which goes through a comparison. :thumbsup:
Also, here's something from page 8 on the status of a system after a BRAND NEW Windows install:
After running the standard Windows installation process and applying numerous software updates to both the OS and user applications, openBench Labs was left with a system volume on our workstation that was severely
fragmented. D:
Specifically we were confronted with:
A system volume with 2,026 fragmented files averaging five fragments per file.
The most fragmented file had 906 fragments.
Free space was fractured into 12,640 fragments with an average size of 296KB.
The largest free space fragment was just 882MB.
-Alex
Social Media Manager
Condusiv Technologies