[jaclaz]

Defcon79, on Oct 20 2008, 07:56 AM, said:

Pardon me for butting in here , but have there been any studies that prove conclusively that defragmentation actually improves performance? I'm not saying file systems don't get fragmented, just skeptical about the need for a dedicated defrag tool for typical home users. Once could say that the fact that Windows comes with them built in is proof enough, I just want to see any empirical, independent data on this.

It's mostly a "state of mind".

There are people that find that defragmenting VERY often is needed, other that think that defragmenting MUST be done, but not so often.

Compare this:
http://www.msfn.org/...ram-t85812.html
http://www.msfn.org/board/Defragment-Progr....html&st=22

As I see it it depends on the use the hard disk is put to, which filesystem is used, and so on, one user might need on a weekly basis, another one on a monthly one, a few a daily (possibly overnight) one.

I would say that when it is needed, defragging a drive is useful, overdoing it is not, point is finding a way of compromise, i.e. at which level of fragmentation the performance decreases up to the point where a defrag is needed and when it is not.

"Blindly" defragging too often, say daily or twice a day, even when there is not a real need, may put additional stress to the mechanical parts of a hard disk.

Lots of articles talk about "case studies" and "researches", but utterly fail to provide a link to them, see this for example:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows...icles/1702.aspx

The only studies you can usually find around are made by the defrag utility makers, thus I wouldn't call them "independent":
http://findarticles....s_/ai_n25159836
http://www.scribd.com/doc/101131/Is-RealTi...eeded-in-Todays


OT, but not much , another hard disk related MYTH is on the way of being debunked, the "wipe-with-several-passes" secure deletion myth:
http://www.911cd.net...showtopic=21783
thanks also to this nice initiative:
http://hardware.slas...08/09/06/189248
http://16systems.com/zero/index.html

jaclaz

[Access Denied]

Ultimate Defrag 2008

[Martin H]

Defcon79, on Oct 20 2008, 07:56 AM, said:

I'm not saying file systems don't get fragmented, just skeptical about the need for a dedicated defrag tool for typical home users.

3'rd party defragmenters that features intelligent file-placement schemes will obviously improve performance compared to the built-in solution, as that dosen't feature intelligent file-placement, but the actual performance difference however, is IMHO indeed very much overestimated by the different 3'rd party vendors...

The most important thing for performance IMHO is to get the filesystem defragmented, period - and so in that case, then the built-in solution is fine, allthough the other 3'rd party defragmenters generally are both faster, defrags more files, consolidates free space and defrags most NTFS metadata also, in addition to the above mentioned intelligent file-placement schemes...

This post has been edited by Martin H: 20 October 2008 - 11:15 AM

[kecowakmanja]

uh oh... JkDefrag...

[RJARRRPCGP]

lynbor, on Sep 14 2008, 02:12 PM, said:

Back in the days of FAT32 and FAT16 I really felt that PC Tools Speed Disk was probably the best. It was slow, but it did a rather thorough job of it.

Speed Disk was from Symantec and NOT from PC Tools.

[RJARRRPCGP]

lynbor, on Sep 14 2008, 02:12 PM, said:

I've used several different defragment utilities over the years and none of them are perfect it seems to me.

Diskkeeper showed promise, but it doesn't seem to live up to it's promises. Using some of it's better features like the set it and forget it and screen saver mode can cause problems on the PC. Plus it doesn't seem to help with performance over the long run.

Back in the days of FAT32 and FAT16 I really felt that PC Tools Speed Disk was probably the best. It was slow, but it did a rather thorough job of it.

The default defragger that comes with Windows still is and always has been nearly useless.

I recently discovered a product called Ultimate Defrag by disktrix.com They have released their older version to home users for free so you can download and try it out. I like all the options, but if you do anything that reorganizes your drive completely it will take a long time to do it. The main thing that I noticed was after allowing it the necessary time to completely reorganize my drive there was a very noticeable difference in performance. I can't say the same for Diskkeeper or the windows default defragger. In order to maintain the performance boost I now run in fragment files only mode which takes only a few minutes to run. I do this about once a week or anytime I do a bunch of cleanup on my system and it's been performing better than it ever has.

So, just from my experiences I have to say that I think Ultimate Defrag is one defrag utility that is not a waste of money, and even the free version is a worthy product.

BTW, I have tried Ultimate Defrag 1.72, which is now freeware and it may be better than JKDefrag 3x!

I'm looking forward to JKDefrag 4!

This post has been edited by RJARRRPCGP: 23 January 2009 - 09:54 PM

[DigeratiPrime]

Please continue discussion at the new topic:
http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=129473