Re: Defragmentation tool for PC

"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

- snips -

>> deadly problems; after reimaging the boot partition twice
>> to get around some nasty crashes I finally went back to
>> SP1; no more hard crashes).

>I've got dozens of clients running SP2 very solidly. I have
>three SP2 systems that I would call "personal". The two at
>home get booted every few weeks.

Congratulations!

My Sun Microsystems workstation (and those of my clients at the time)
often went 300+ days without booting. Boots were so rare on those machines
that it was like catching a full solar eclipse.

I was initially pleased with XP as well until 8 months later when the
first nuclear-explosion-grade suicide took place, and then another just
like a few months later.

Thankfully I didn't rely on the XP recovery system (which wouldn't even
start), I'd imaged the OS partition on a backup drive, and kept apps and
data on separate partitions. Recovery simply meant an OS reimage and
reboot; no painful app reinstalls or lengthy restore processes, and the
data and app partitions were still up-to-date.

A casual, dark-humor observation was that on balance XP wasn't any more
stable than its ancestors -- it just looked more stable because all
the daily crashes had been bunched together into one BIG one that happened
less often.

>> In my experience the XP defrag tool seems to be a little
>> dumb. Had a 200 GByte drive (NTFS) with 50 Gbyte free.
>> Had to do some shuffling there right off the bat because
>> XP defrag needs at least 15% free space to work!!

>Do the math: 50/200 = 25% free space.

I probabaly didn't state clearly that *even before I started* defrag I had
to move a bunch of files to get 15% free space. According to their site,
the Raxco Perfect Disk product only needs 5% free. That's rather
attractive right there. (Interesting info on that site btw; worth a review
www.raxco.com)

>Was there actually a performance problem related to those
>files?

Indirectly on a couple of points -

- most of today's drives that we like to buy oh so cheaply are built "on
the edge". Many will fail sooner than we'd like, but when? Which one? If a
proper defrag (at a reasonable interval that reflects file system usage)
can help push out that failure date by reducing the overall mechanical
stress, great.

I tend to pre-emptively replace drives anyway but you can still get bitten
at inopportune times. (I don't do auto-defrags; I check every 1-3 months;
on this drive XP told me I should defrag.)

Long (3 year) drive warranties have almost vanished; the numbers game of
build quality/manufacturing cost/heat/density etc
have altered that warranty landscape for many manufacturers.

- post crash data recovery is potentially easier if file pieces are not
overly scattered. (I've been here; the recovery sw I used a while back
seemed a little more successful with those files that were in fewer
pieces. Would you rather put Humpty Dumpty back together from dust or a
few big chunks? <g>)

>NTFS by design pre-fragments files. Not into a jillion
>little pieces, but into a reasonable number of extents.

Interesting. What is the rationale behind this? Fragmented audio
multitrack files make sense on one level (as do big files spread on
multiple platters for the fastest read from a single head arm) but I'm
curious why a general-purpose file system would do this initally, but
then undo it later with a defrag...?

>> This is the kind of annoyance we really should not have
>> to do or put up with any more. What am I missing?

>(1) The ability to do trivial math ;-)
>(2) A real problem

See my replies above.

My frustration with Microsoft is that they often reinvent the wheel and
make it square in the process, or in their design overlook the need of a
hub and axle on which to mount that wheel.

Frank Stearns
Mobile Audio
--
.
.

Relevant Pages

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