Norton utilities.. SLOWdisk?

[Shudder]

Sure it's "optimizing" my drive, but is it in a way that windows doesn't like? It seems whenever I optimize it, it takes things such as my browsers to load up a LOT slower than they used to, almost 5x as slow it seems (1 vs 5 seconds )

And then when I check back at the HDD map, it's way messed up again.

Am I crazy, or is Norton just a way to make the data on your HDD look all pretty in colours when you map it out? It goes away real quick and runs like garbage to me.

 

[Reverence]

It's generally not a good idea to run other programs while running a disk defrag utility. Everytime the hard drive gets written to, the defragmentor has to start over. Not only that, but it's very disk I/O intensive.

Also, if you're running Windows9x/ME there is a setting to disable write verification (I'm not sure if it is selected by default or not)-this can increase the speed of the entire process dramatically.

Norton Speed disk is actually a very good program, you should just schedule it to run about every week or so during a time you're not using the computer (sleeping, at work etc.).

 

[shathal]

Every week? That's a tad of overkill, my friend.

Nothing (or rather, very little) kills/stresses drives as much as defragging. As such, they shouldn't be defragged too often. Also, realistically speaking - drives only get badly fragmented over time. If you defrag the drives once every 3-6 months you will be fine really.

Other than that, I definately second Reverence - you do not want to be doing ANYTHING with your system while it's defragging. Disk I/O is very heavy work for the system. You do not want to be running apps (or - for that matter - Virus Scanners) while the system is defragging. Just let it work over a weekend or a work-day (depends how big your HD's are & how fast they are).

What you're doing is the equivalent of ... hmmm ... trying to make someone read a book while they're driving. The driving (read: defragging) is a very consuming task - you preferrably do not want to distract the system from doing it. So, don't make it read books (i.e.: run apps). Not good. And the poor thing has to start again from scratch if the system gets written. So - just leave it do its magic alone .

Hope this explains & helps somewhat .

 

[NeMeSi]

I had the same problem with my drive. Everytime I ran Norton' Slowdisk, it drastically slowed my load time up on games as well as droped my FPS by 20-30 points. WTF is with that. After a couple of days, it would go away.

Anyways, I do not recommend any Norton products to anyone: over-priced, system resource hogs, and poor interaction with '9x kernels causing an increased number of BSOD's!:disgust:

 

[jaywallen]

Shudder,

I feel that Norton's defragger is a triumph of obsession over reason. As you appear to be suspecting, it's for anal retentives who want the data arranged the way they think they'd like to see it arranged if they were disk drives. Diskeeper (commercial versions), O&O and Perfect Disk work better for the system's sake. (And I'm certain there may be others with which I'm not familiar.) The Norton defraggers, when set to do online MFT defragging, are also flying in the face of reason by defragging something online that should only be defragged at boot time. And Microsoft says so right in the MSKB.

shathal,



<< Nothing (or rather, very little) kills/stresses drives as much as defragging. As such, they shouldn't be defragged too often. Also, realistically speaking - drives only get badly fragmented over time. If you defrag the drives once every 3-6 months you will be fine really. >>



I've seen this assertion made many times, but I strongly disagree. And I have a great deal of experience with data on MTBF of drives in use on machines with and without the benefits of routine defragging. Defragging doesn't kill drives, nor does it necessarily stress drives any more than ordinary use does. Regarding electro-mechanical stresses induced by defragging vs. normal use patterns, there is a break-even point, probably somewhere between the home user and a small database server's usual operations in most cases, where the drive would actually be stressed more if you didn't defrag routinely. In other words, the heads have to jump about more to retrieve / write data because files are not written contiguously, so the wear and tear you save by not defragging is more than compensated for by increased wear and tear during the system's regular operations. The more heavily the system is used, the more important it is to guard agains file system fragmentation. On systems which do a lot of thrashing, like busy SQL servers, not defragging is the death of system performance -- and definitely results in far more wear and tear on the system's drives. Benchmarks prove the point about performance, and the time between failure statistics prove the point about wear and tear.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Shudder]

I'm afraid I didn't make myself clear.

I defrag the system.. I DO NOT do anything while it's working. I know that would slow my system down

But it runs, defrags the disk, it's arranged &quot;optimally&quot; but DAMN does it take forever for a program to load up. Then if I run defragger again, the map is way out of whack.. almost worse than before I defragged. Why's that?

jaywallen: I believe you are correct. Sure it's logically better if the data's arranged that way, but I dont' think the OS knows or cares if it's accessed more or less and certainly won't rearrange the data back that way. It's this reason that my things run like crap after &quot;optimizing.&quot; Using Diskkeeper I NEVER have that problem. I haven't heard of O&amp;O though.

And glad to see I'm not the only one who gets crappy performance for a short while after using slowdisk.

The reason I tried something new to begin with was for some reason, maybe it's just the way NTFS is, my windows partition never seems to get defragged, and its free space is never defragged either. Fat drives have no problem (This is with the commercial version of Diskkeeper BTW) but still, my 5 gig NTFS drive is never defragmented. Maybe NTFS doesn't need to be that much? I don't know. But I can't stand slowdisk and I think it'll be gone tonight.

 

[jaywallen]

Hi, Shudder.

Which version of Diskeeper were you using? Were you employing boot-time defrag features (MFT, pagefile, directories)? How about frag guard? I use Diskeeper on servers because frag guard helps prevent fragmentation in the first place, and the background defragger (&quot;Set it and forget it&quot can run on most fast servers without having a serious impact upon performance. I use O&amp;O on notebooks and some types of workstations. Its boot-time defragger can be set to always at each boot time include (almost) anything that can't be defragged online, though the option isn't obvious in the GUI. You have to tell Diskeeper each time if you want it to run a boot time defrag.

NTFS partitions are much harder to defrag because so many items are off-limits to any defragger which adheres to the Microsoft APIs. The metadata is simply out of bounds, for instance, for online defragging. So it may be that you will get closer to a full file and free space defragged condition with Diskeeper if you study the features of the program a bit more (or if you get a later version, if you happen to be using an older one). I actually use both Diskeeper AND O&amp;O Defrag on my personal notebook. But you can't quite get an NTFS volume to the same state of &quot;defragmentedness&quot; (heh-heh, love to make up words) as a FAT volume because of the difference in the nature of the file systems. On the other hand, fragmentation has much less effect upon an NTFS volume's peformance than it has upon a FAT volume's performance, though defragging is still a good thing to do -- for more reasons than just performance. But I don't think you need to worry about the appearance of the file system being a bit &quot;fragmented&quot; as long as not many of the files themselves are fragmented.

Oh yes, and I meant to mention this point, though I'm doing so for the sake of any others that might be reading the thread who might not be familiar with Diskeeper. It's a multi-pass defragger. It's not designed to fully defrag the disk in a single pass. Executive Software publishes the reasoning for this at their Web site. The result of this design &quot;feature&quot; is that when running the defragger manually, you may have to run it several times to get the maximum effect from it.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Shudder]

I'm using version 6 of diskkeeper and I do do things like boot-time for folders and MFT. I cannot get the pagefile to defragment because it's 200MB, and I don't have enough unfragmented drive space to do it. I do have 2 gigs free space, but like I said the free space is pretty fragmented and doesn't want to change. I usually run it a few times in a row.

 

[jaywallen]

Hi,

Okay, so you have 2 gigs free. I take it that this is in another partition from the W2K install, then? You should be able to direct W2K to place the pagefile in another partition (or on another drive), reboot, run the defragger on your main W2K partition, then set the system to place the pagefile back in the W2K partition. Or am I misunderstanding your situation? Sorry if I'm being dense.

Regards,
Jim

Edit: Ooops! Okay, I read your last post again. I guess it's all on one partition? Can you save some data off to removable media or to a network drive, then erase it from the partition so that defragging becomes more feasible?

 

[Shudder]

I have more than one partition, so moving it wouldn't be a problem.

However, I'm worried that if I move it/eliminate it, defrag, then put it back, the free space sill won't be clear and it'll be in worse shape than it was before

 

[jaywallen]

Hmmm. I can't imagine how that would happen. But, of course, anything is possible. Is there anything really unusual about your system's configuration to lead you to think of this possibility?

BTW, what percentage of the total partition space is free, and what size is the partition? The drive must have been fragmented very badly. And the defraggers have recommended limits for percentage of free space available on partitions to be defragged. To tell you the truth, I'm not certain that I remember what Diskeeper wants you to have. 10%, 20%??? But, assuming you can move quite a bit of stuff (especially fragmented data) off the partition to another partition or to external media, you should be able to get the OS fully defragged by running Diskeeper repeatedly. I would recommend turning off all other, or at least most other, non-service processes while doing this, and perhaps setting Diskeeper's priority to the High setting to give it max horsepower for doing the job. And then I'd recommend running the defragger repeatedly, until you stop seeing an improvement in file system fragmentation status with each run.

Other than these ideas, I'm not sure what to suggest.

I hope you'll get around this little road block somehow.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Shudder]

5 gig drive, about 2 gigs free give or take a couple hundred megs.

I suppose I shut down as much as I can, though I don't really have much running at all. I just find it odd that it doesn't do anything with the free space, but with the Fat drives it'll take all day if it needs to just to move tiny bits of free space so it's all at the end.

 

[jaywallen]

Hmmm. Sounds like locked files or metadata. When you run a defrag on the NTFS partition, do you look at the list of locked files it reports? You certainly have enough free space on the drive, percentage-wise, so that a defrag should be effective.

Regards,
Jim

Edit: BTW, Diskeeper (and other defraggers) do such a thorough job on FAT partitions because they CAN do a thorough job. Unless the FAT partition is the active booted partition, there are no locked files on it. And, in any case, the &quot;locking&quot; isn't the same. NTFS is strict.

 

[jaywallen]

I'm beginning to wonder if you shouldn't download RAXCO's Perfect Disk. I'm not really experienced with it, though I did test it some a version or two ago. It is capable of defragging all metadata. The company says that they're the only defragger that does this, but it's not strictly true. If you know how to set it up, O&amp;O will also do the job, at least on most partitions. Anyway, it probably would hurt to give the trial version a shot at your system. It's supposed to be a very good product. I rejected it for my systems because there were a couple of glitches in the GUI, or at least that's how I perceived them. But I know someone distantly who works for the company, and he says they've straightened out the GUI issues.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Shudder]

O&amp;O seems pretty decent, and I'm always for free stuff

Seems to be ok.. I've never really had performance issues, so I'll suppose it's just the way NTFS works and be happy I have a lot of Ram

 

[jaywallen]

Fer shur!

BTW, the O&amp;O Defrag to which I was referring was the Pro version, which does cost a few denaro. I was also referring to the commercial versions of Diskeeper. I'm not certain whether or not the freeware versions have the ability to do boot-time defragging of everything. It's been a few revision numbers since I've seen those versions. Anyway, good luck in your quest to find the ideal defragger!

Regards,
Jim

 

[Shudder]

I don't know if I'll find an ideal defragger

As much as I thought norton sucked, apparently it DID help with the free space fragmentation. Then I just ran diskkeeper again to put stuff the way it should be.. but it had the free space clear like I wanted.

So maybe norton will get use once a month or two I'll see if O&amp;O pro has a demo with it because the free doesn't do any advanced or boot time stuff and I'm curious to see how it handles it before I decide to make a purchase.

Thanks for all your help and the other software recommendations.

 

[jaywallen]

You are most welcome. I hope you'll find the right combo for you.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Shudder]

Adding some info that may be of some use or interesting to someone.

I was checking out Diskeeper's site and the guy who owns the company/wrote the software wrote a book on fragmentation. This guy really gets his rocks off organizing data apparently.

But it has a section that talks just about optimization and why it's a waste. Kind of biased, but I'm sure it's not that executive software couldn't write an optimizer.. I mean, I'm sure it's not THAT tough to do, but it's interesting to see their argument of why it's bad.

For instance one thing I never thought of is when people talk about the beginning and end of a hard drive.. not taking into consideration the different platters. So the end of one platter would be at the beginning of another.. opposite ends of the speed spectrum really.


Optimization Chapter

Also, looking at O&amp;O pro version, they optimize in a possibly more efficient manner than norton. They have regular space like diskeeper, but you can also choose by date or by name. This doesn't make up accessed/infrequently accessed accounts like Norton but may be a decent way to arrange data. BUT, if optimization is a waste, at least they give you the option of just doing it the normal way (something norton doesn't do)

 

[jaywallen]

Yup, the Executive Software site has a fair amount of pretty useful stuff on it. And the information in your post is why I don't worry much about so-called &quot;free-space defragmentation&quot;, even though I do use O&amp;O. The defragger DOES need to rearrange the free space in contiguous chunks so as to provide enough free space that they system isn't forced to fragment large new files when they're written to the partition. But the hard drive layout doesn't have to be like the kid's bedroom with all the toys put away in one corner. I think Diskeeper and O&amp;O both achieve a pretty good approximation of what the system really needs to do its reading and writing properly.

Regards,
Jim