W
Will_S
How long should a 500g drive take to defrag ? 200gig used .
Should a screen appear or is the icon the only thing you see ?
Should a screen appear or is the icon the only thing you see ?
R
ray
Zero - this is the 21st century - a properly designed file system should
not need to be defragmented.
F
Frank
ray said:
Bullsh*t ray. Even though you linux zealots like to think that linux is
the answer (it isn't), all mechanical HDD FRAGMENT, regardless of the
type of file system used.
All of them!
Frank
M
Michael Palumbo
Frank said:
Very true Frank, but the Unix/Linux file systems are quite a bit better at
keeping fragmentation down during use, and many use idle time to "clean up"
after themselves when things do get a little fragmented.
No real need for a separate program to do it, or a scheduled time to do it.
It just gets done when you're not looking.
And no, I'm NOT a Linux fan-boy, but I do use it for support and I prefer
the thin Gentoo distro of Linux for server purposes. (No GUI, so the CPU
and RAM are used for actual work instead of pretty pictures.)
Mic
F
Frank
Michael said:
Well duh! Vista does the very same.
No real need for a separate program to do it, or a scheduled time to do
it. It just gets done when you're not looking.
Golly gee...Vista does the same!
I run headless WHS...no pretty pictures.
Frank
N
NoStop
Frank said:
I'll be the first to agree Frank, you certainly do run headless. I've been
trying to tell you that for sometime now. Please read my sig for helpful
information on how you can deal with your headless problem. It's there to
help you.
Cheers.
--
An HONEST Vista Ad:
The Rolling Stones Love Vista:
Frank - seek help immediately! Visit ...
http://www.binsa.org/
R
ray
Frank, please reread my post - I didn't mention Linux. I've had a couple
of systems running for about three years now with no defragging, and they
run as well as the day they were installed.
N
norm
There is a difference in what fragmentation means when comparing windowsFrank said:
and linux, and what it means in terms of maintenance. Please take the
following only as information pertinent to the discussion:
http://dataexpedition.com/~sbnoble/Tips/filesystems.html
Fragmentation and Optimization
You have probably heard these two terms used a lot, particularly when
someone is trying to sell you something. Unfortunately, these terms have
been badly mangled over the years and it is often difficult to discern
what is meant.
First of all, there are two different notions of "fragmentation". The
most common usage of this term refers to the data "in" a file being
scattered around on a drive such that the heads have to move back and
forth in order to read all the data. Head movement takes a long time
compared to just spinning the disk, so fragmented files are a bad thing.
In the unix world, there is also another definition of "fragmentation"
which means something quite different. If you look at the "ufs",
"fs_ufs", or "fsck" man pages, the "fragments" that they are talking
about have to do with the allocation of individual blocks. In UFS, a
single disk block can be broken up into sub-blocks or "fragments". This
"block fragmentation" is completely different from "file fragmentation".
A lot of people get confused by this because they see "fsck" report a
some level of "fragmentation" on their disk. fsck is talking about block
fragmentation, which is not something anyone really needs to worry about.
File fragmentation, on the other hand, can cause some major performance
problems for your computer. As noted above, moving the hard drive head
around takes a lot of time. Thus for optimal system performance, you
want all the data that's going to be accessed at one time to be grouped
together on the disk. But different operating systems have different
ideas about what "grouped together" means, and it doesn't always match
with reality.
PC operating systems generally treat the hard drive as one big linear
array of data. That is, they ignore its three dimensional nature and pay
no attention to where in the drive files are placed. About the only
effort they make at optimizing storage is to try and write each file
contiguously... that is all in one long, unbroken sequence of blocks.
But over time files get moved around or deleted, free space gets chopped
up into many disperate chunks, and peices of files end up scattered all
over. Thus many vendors sell "disk optimizers" which try to rearrange
all the files so that each one is contiguous (in one chunk). They may
even try to group files that seem related "near" each other in the big
long line of bytes.
The problem with this linear approach is that it is both inflexible and
somtimes wrong. For example, a file may be stored in a sequential
collection of blocks but still cross a track boundary. Thus even though
the optimizer software says the file is fine, accessing it still
requires head movement. More imporantly, when the OS goes to write a
file, it has too look for a contiguous line of free space so that it can
write the blocks in linear sequence. But in reality, only the sectors
need to be in sequence and the file should all be on the same (or
nearby) cylinders. As a result of this operating system ignorance, PC's
generally must have their disks optimized every so often in order to
prevent performance from degrading.
Unix file systems, on the other hand, tend to take disk geometry into
account. This gives them a lot of flexiblity in where the place files
and allows them to keep a drive performing very well without having to
run external optimizers. The downside is that when the hard drive is
formatted, its exact geometry must be known and written into the file
system. That is, the system must know how many heads, cylinders, and
sectors there are in order to correctly place the files. This can be
difficult with modern drives whose geometries may be quite complex
(variable sectors per cylinder, for example). If this information is not
available, or is not accurate, then the drive may perform very poorly.
Incidentally, it is not clear whether MacOS X takes drive geometry into
account. Given its dual MacOS and BSD roots, it could go either way.
M
Michael Palumbo
Frank said:
Technically speaking, Frank, the fact that Vista includes a scheduled defrag
using a separate, but included, program isn't the same as how Unix/Linux and
BSD file systems handle this.
The ability to better handle file placement is built right into the file
system(s), not something that's added on, as in Windows.
I try not to get involved in conversations with certain "names" on these
groups, I forgot that little rule of mine. I'll not do it again and I'll
only try to answer questions that I think I can help with from here on in as
the "names" I'm not mentioning are so fixed in their views about what they
like, even if you point them to correct information they still want to
argue, and insult, and I have no time for that.
And no, Frank, I'm not saying you are arguing with or insulting me directly,
but your "Well duh!" and "Golly gee" are very condescending by nature and
I'll not have my intelligence questioned, or even slightly insulted by
someone that I've observed resort to insults and name calling when he
doesn't agree with someone.
I do thank you for your restraint in this case and not immediately accusing
me of being drunk, or stupid, or assuming I don't know near as much as you
about computers.
Mic
T
Travis Crow
NoStop said:
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Blimp TV
A
AJR
Most seem to ignore a major benefit of defrag - Vista (and XP) track usage
over a period of time - defrag uses that information to place heavy usage
items at the beginning sectors of the HD during the defrag process.
over a period of time - defrag uses that information to place heavy usage
items at the beginning sectors of the HD during the defrag process.
M
Michael Palumbo
AJR said:
A valid point, but with drives today this isn't quite as beneficial as it
used to be.
I'm not saying it doesn't help, but we've gotten to the point where this
practice is now shaving microseconds instead of seconds, but I do concede
that it does still help, especially when you're talking about loading many
hundreds of megabytes, or even gigabytes of data from the 'faster' part of
the platters.
Mic
M
Michael Palumbo
Michael Palumbo said:
Sorry, correction . . . meant to say "milliseconds" instead, BIG difference
.. . .
Mic