How to keep your filesystem (NTFS, XP, Vista ...)

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: martensite
FWIW, here is a timely (hehe) and personal anecdote from last week regarding my friend's desktop.

It's a mid-low range PC: 3700+, A8N-E, 512MB (originally 1 GB, but one stick died), 160 GB (~35% free space), Asus/Pioneer DL DVDRW; in fact almost identical to my old system since both of us purchased the components at the same time.

I am trying to burn a 4.7GB TDK 16X DVD+R with a few 700MB divx files so I can take them home to my PC. I know that the media is fine, I've never had a single bad burn from more than 40 samples, but on his PC, it failed repeatedly at 16x. 3 discs ended up as coasters. Buffer underrun protection was on, tried another DVD+R(LG) etc, but with the same result. I thought his dvd writer was screwed and recommended that he replace the POS and that he should have bought a BenQ 1640 in the first place lol.

Then I thought I'd analyze his HDD and hell, the XP defragger showed more red than a Commie rally. He had not defragged in more than a year lol. Lots of free space, but ridiculous amount of fragmentation too. Ran Ccleaner, downloaded and ran the trial version of Diskeeper 2008 and defragged... took quite a while. Tried to burn again and it burned perfectly fine! Apart from defragging, i did not change one thing.

So, I dont think defragmentation is unnecessary at all. I think it helps quite a bit. No reason NOT to defrag, especially when it doesnt require much effort anyway.

So you're claiming that the burn-proof feature of the drive was disabled/non-functional, until you defragmented the HD? I don't buy the story, that's illogical.

A more logical solution is that a media compatibility issue exists between his drive, and the media that you brought over.

 

[RVN]

I use O&O to defrag my storage. Depending on the file type it seems faster at accessing and burning data. I also defrag my OS drive, but haven't noticed any "speeding things up" over the built-in, but I use it since I've got it.

 

[JesseKnows]

I was running and XP box at work (P4 3GHz, 1.5GB DDRAM), and it was noticeably slow. IT said to defrag, I defragged, and it became more responsive.

No measurements, just subjective statements

 

[Nothinman]

No measurements, just subjective statements

i.e. possibly placebo affect

 

[martensite]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

So you're claiming that the burn-proof feature of the drive was disabled/non-functional, until you defragmented the HD? I don't buy the story, that's illogical.

A more logical solution is that a media compatibility issue exists between his drive, and the media that you brought over.

The buffer was running at 30-40% all the time before the defrag, with Nero running and an a couple of IE pages open; I should have probably mentioned it in my post. After the defrag, it was running closer to 90-95% under the same conditions.

There was no 'media compatibility issue' between the drive and the media :roll: it's good media and the drive is a good drive. It has been burning the same media just fine since then.

Like I said, I did not do anything apart from a defrag, so if anything else could have miraculously solved the problem, well, by all means, speculate.

 

[martensite]

Originally posted by: bsobel


Well the fact that you state the inner edge performance is 50% slower shows you have no business discussing this.

Please explain this statement; I don't understand. Is it a myth that the outer edge performance is faster than the inner edge of the platter?

 

[rchiu]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

No measurements, just subjective statements

i.e. possibly placebo affect

Yeah everyone must be imagining the benefit of defrag. I don't sell defrag tools and I can tell you from working in a fortune 50 company that the first thing IT support tell people to do when people complain about PC performance is to defrag the computer.

I don't care if you have 8, 16 gig of memory, your PC have to access your HDD sometime, and keeping your files optimized is the best way to increase your PC's performance. HDD performance is pretty much the bottleneck in the entire PC system, so improving your HDD performance will help your overall PC performance quite a bit.

 

[Nothinman]

The buffer was running at 30-40% all the time before the defrag, with Nero running and an a couple of IE pages open; I should have probably mentioned it in my post. After the defrag, it was running closer to 90-95% under the same conditions.

So either Nero was misconfigured and didn't use Burn-Proof to protect against underruns or your drive is old enough to not support it because that's exactly what it's designed to guard against.

Yeah everyone must be imagining the benefit of defrag. I don't sell defrag tools and I can tell you from working in a fortune 50 company that the first thing IT support tell people to do when people complain about PC performance is to defrag the computer.

Pretty much, yes, in most cases they are likely imagining it. If you're not reading a file in one large contiguous read (hint: in most cases you aren't) then why would having the file be in one contiguous chunk be helpful? And I can tell you from my work and personal experience that first level IT support people are usually idiots.

I don't care if you have 8, 16 gig of memory, your PC have to access your HDD sometime, and keeping your files optimized is the best way to increase your PC's performance. HDD performance is pretty much the bottleneck in the entire PC system, so improving your HDD performance will help your overall PC performance quite a bit.

Yes disk I/O is usually the bottleneck but defragging doesn't make that big of a difference in virtually all cases.

 

[nerp]

Originally posted by: martensite

Originally posted by: bsobel


Well the fact that you state the inner edge performance is 50% slower shows you have no business discussing this.

Please explain this statement; I don't understand. Is it a myth that the outer edge performance is faster than the inner edge of the platter?

It's not a myth. The difference is very small though. Claiming it's 50 percent slower is a huge exaggeration or bad information.