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Windows Vista

S

sonoma1993

Diamond Member
Why did Microsoft have to make disk defragmenter in windows vista suck so bad? From what I know, you can select the drive you want to defrag, who knows if just defrag the hdd windows is install on, or if it defrags all of the hdd. It doesn't give you any kind of graphical display how the fragmentation is looking on the hdd.
 
1. Is defragmentation really necessary? I have read where defragging is actually rarely necessary. Is this heresy? Why does Windows require defragging and Linux does not?
2. It's $29.99, but Executive Diskeeper is a nice program.
Vista Diskeeper


 
Originally posted by: sonoma1993
It doesn't give you any kind of graphical display how the fragmentation is looking on the hdd.
Click to expand...

Primarily because such a graphical display is rather useless. They don't tell you whether the fragmented files are large or small or how many fragments they're in. Something that doesn't typically require sequential reads won't benefit at all from defragging, so giving you the graphical display simply makes you paranoid for no good reason.
 
Doesn't Vista defrag on the fly?
The reason why Linux doesn't need it is because the file system is different. Think about it this way. When you install windows everything is put on the hard drive from the begining of the drive and fills up all the bits until it is done. Now you add files, or delete files and that leaves open spaces in the contiguous data. Now to keep from running out of room real quick, windows fills those gaps with data, but it has to break data up into the cluster sizes. Now stuff is all over the place and that will slow down hard drive activity.
 
One area where this would concern me is transferring video from a digital camcorder.

Supposedly it's better to capture video to a large contiguous space on a hard drive, how can such a space be assured in Vista ?

 
Originally posted by: sonoma1993
Why did Microsoft have to make disk defragmenter in windows vista suck so bad? From what I know, you can select the drive you want to defrag, who knows if just defrag the hdd windows is install on, or if it defrags all of the hdd. It doesn't give you any kind of graphical display how the fragmentation is looking on the hdd.
Click to expand...

I agreed that sucks to lose the feedback and control. You run it, and have no idea how big of a problem you have, which drives it's working on, and how long the process will take. This is somewhat explained with the rationalizations, but, esp. in view of all they hype about Vista's UI, it's a step back in usability unless you take the 'let's just schedule it and have it do what it wants, it knows better than me of course" perspective.

I'd rather have the UI be able to select the drives, and to display by default the "partially defragmented" view of > 64M segments of files as "unfragmented" or even numerical statistics through the GUI instead of the convoluted path through an elevated command shell.

On the plus side, I think Diskeeper will gain some revenue because of this, and perhaps they can make a superior product with that money.
 
Supposedly it's better to capture video to a large contiguous space on a hard drive, how can such a space be assured in Vista ?
Click to expand...

By having a seperate, empty scratch drive for your video capturing.

I agreed that sucks to lose the feedback and control. You run it, and have no idea how big of a problem you have, which drives it's working on, and how long the process will take.
Click to expand...

The old UI didn't relay how big the problem was or how long it'll take accurately either.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Supposedly it's better to capture video to a large contiguous space on a hard drive, how can such a space be assured in Vista ?
Click to expand...

By having a seperate, empty scratch drive for your video capturing.

I agreed that sucks to lose the feedback and control. You run it, and have no idea how big of a problem you have, which drives it's working on, and how long the process will take.
Click to expand...

The old UI didn't relay how big the problem was or how long it'll take accurately either.
Click to expand...


So the only way to have a large contiguous space on a hard drive in Vista is to use hard drives once then discard them ?

 
Originally posted by: Tom
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Supposedly it's better to capture video to a large contiguous space on a hard drive, how can such a space be assured in Vista ?
Click to expand...

By having a seperate, empty scratch drive for your video capturing.

I agreed that sucks to lose the feedback and control. You run it, and have no idea how big of a problem you have, which drives it's working on, and how long the process will take.
Click to expand...

The old UI didn't relay how big the problem was or how long it'll take accurately either.
Click to expand...


So the only way to have a large contiguous space on a hard drive in Vista is to use hard drives once then discard them ?
Click to expand...

Why not write to drive then when you're done creating the video delete the old data or just format the drive
 
So the only way to have a large contiguous space on a hard drive in Vista is to use hard drives once then discard them ?
Click to expand...

No, you have 1 drive as temporary storage that you capture to and after that you move it to another drive and the space is then freed for another use. And that's the only way to ensure really large contiguous free space under any OS, it's not something new with Vista.
 
Originally posted by: Madwand1
Originally posted by: sonoma1993
Why did Microsoft have to make disk defragmenter in windows vista suck so bad? From what I know, you can select the drive you want to defrag, who knows if just defrag the hdd windows is install on, or if it defrags all of the hdd. It doesn't give you any kind of graphical display how the fragmentation is looking on the hdd.
Click to expand...

I agreed that sucks to lose the feedback and control. You run it, and have no idea how big of a problem you have, which drives it's working on, and how long the process will take. This is somewhat explained with the rationalizations, but, esp. in view of all they hype about Vista's UI, it's a step back in usability unless you take the 'let's just schedule it and have it do what it wants, it knows better than me of course" perspective.

I'd rather have the UI be able to select the drives, and to display by default the "partially defragmented" view of > 64M segments of files as "unfragmented" or even numerical statistics through the GUI instead of the convoluted path through an elevated command shell.

On the plus side, I think Diskeeper will gain some revenue because of this, and perhaps they can make a superior product with that money.
Click to expand...

Yeah I was using Diskeeper pro 10 but it doesn't support windows vista. I'll have to upgrade to it eventually.
 
A block display does not make defragmentation more effective. That's just pretty stuff for noobs. The Vista defragmenter isn't meant for you to sit and watch it go. It's meant to run silently in the background late at night when the computer is idle.

Do you actually sit and watch that thing???

 
Originally posted by: Smilin
A block display does not make defragmentation more effective. That's just pretty stuff for noobs. The Vista defragmenter isn't meant for you to sit and watch it go. It's meant to run silently in the background late at night when the computer is idle.

Do you actually sit and watch that thing???
Click to expand...

do I, heck no, I usally defrag my system while taking a shower or watching tv or somethen. But I like being able to select which drive I want to defrag and stuff.
 
Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski
Doesn't Vista defrag on the fly?
The reason why Linux doesn't need it is because the file system is different. Think about it this way. When you install windows everything is put on the hard drive from the begining of the drive and fills up all the bits until it is done. Now you add files, or delete files and that leaves open spaces in the contiguous data. Now to keep from running out of room real quick, windows fills those gaps with data, but it has to break data up into the cluster sizes. Now stuff is all over the place and that will slow down hard drive activity.
Click to expand...

That's a great description of classic FAT fragmentation but NTFS works a bit more like what you see in some *nix filesystems. Windows doesn't put everything at the beginning of the drive and work from there.
 
PerfectDisk v8.5 now supports XP & Vista, plus according to Raxco's techs will allow you to defrag either OS from the other without risking damage to eithers file systems & in particular defragging the swap file on a regular basis has a noticable effect on performance.

In my dual-boot setup I've only got it installed on XP at the moment, but I've defragged the Vista partition without any apparent ill effects, however I havn't had the system in dual-boot mode for long enough to comment on any conflicts with Vista's built in utilities & since I havn't figured out how to turn them off yet I'm a little concerned.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
So the only way to have a large contiguous space on a hard drive in Vista is to use hard drives once then discard them ?
Click to expand...

No, you have 1 drive as temporary storage that you capture to and after that you move it to another drive and the space is then freed for another use. And that's the only way to ensure really large contiguous free space under any OS, it's not something new with Vista.
Click to expand...


ok, i didn't know that moving large files would recreate one contiguous space without defragging. in fact, i thought that was what defragging was for.



 
ok, i didn't know that moving large files would recreate one contiguous space without defragging. in fact, i thought that was what defragging was for.
Click to expand...

You move them after you're done working with them. I really hope you're simply trying to be especially obtuse here.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
ok, i didn't know that moving large files would recreate one contiguous space without defragging. in fact, i thought that was what defragging was for.
Click to expand...

You move them after you're done working with them. I really hope you're simply trying to be especially obtuse here.
Click to expand...


No, just wondering. So you mean you have to move all of them, and then all the space will be contiguous ?

I'm not an expert by any means, but I thought in the old days that deleting a file only reset something at the start of the file, and the operating system would use unused space on the drive before it wrote over the space where the deleted file was. So deleting files and rewriting files would leave non-contiguous free space on the drive.

And one thing defragging does is get all the free space back into one continuous space. Now, I don't know if that's correct, even for fat32, and I know even less about ntfs and whatever Vista does, so what I'm asking is if you know for a fact that this isn't necessary anymore ?

 
Originally posted by: sonoma1993
Originally posted by: Smilin
A block display does not make defragmentation more effective. That's just pretty stuff for noobs. The Vista defragmenter isn't meant for you to sit and watch it go. It's meant to run silently in the background late at night when the computer is idle.

Do you actually sit and watch that thing???
Click to expand...

do I, heck no, I usally defrag my system while taking a shower or watching tv or somethen. But I like being able to select which drive I want to defrag and stuff.
Click to expand...

Are you aware the system probably has a defrag of all your drives already setup in scheduled tasks? No really reason to worry about it, it will get done at some point.
 
Originally posted by: bsobel
Originally posted by: sonoma1993
Originally posted by: Smilin
A block display does not make defragmentation more effective. That's just pretty stuff for noobs. The Vista defragmenter isn't meant for you to sit and watch it go. It's meant to run silently in the background late at night when the computer is idle.

Do you actually sit and watch that thing???
Click to expand...

do I, heck no, I usally defrag my system while taking a shower or watching tv or somethen. But I like being able to select which drive I want to defrag and stuff.
Click to expand...

Are you aware the system probably has a defrag of all your drives already setup in scheduled tasks? No really reason to worry about it, it will get done at some point.
Click to expand...


It does. Wednesday at 1am I believe. Check your scheduled tasks. It is one of many things that are just taken care of that you don't have to worry about.

Go read Stash's links, Sonoma.

 
For most users it's best to just let Vista automatically defrag in the background. That's why it's better not to scare users with a graphical image showing many red areas, making them defrag all the time. The few advanced users who actually have a good reason to defrag (ex: working with large video files) can download a 3rd party defrag program.
 
I assume, and hope you can disable it, and do it manually when you want to, specifically when your not using the computer?
 
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