Defragmentation, Prefetch, and layout.ini

G

Guest

This week I learned (or think I learned), at least in broad outline, how
prefetch, layout.ini, and Disk Defragmenter work together. As I understand
it, prefetch monitors how files load into RAM in order to determine an
optimum order for placing these files on the physical hard drive, it
eventually records this information to a file called layout.ini, and then --
every three days during an idle period or during every manual defragmentation
operation -- Disk Defragmenter reorganizes these files accordingly on the
physical hard drive. As a consequence, these files are located continguously
and at the outside of the physical disk, where access time is the fastest
(i.e the disk arm can read the most data over the same period -- think
Galileo and some fancy math involving pendulums, but I digress). Microsoft
claims that this process can eventually result in a performance improvement
of as much as 10%. See the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/benchmark.mspx

[Note: this same article has a great performance tip. By running the
following command:

Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

you can force Windows XP to run idle tasks immediately, including recording
data to layout.ini and defragmentation of the files listed in layout.ini to
the optimal parts of the disk.]

Okay, here is my question: besides Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter, do third
party defragmenters also use layout.ini to relocate selected files in this
manner? I know that PerfeckDisk does something with the layout.ini file, but
I'm not sure it does the same thing that the Microsoft Disk Defragmenter
does. Does Diskeeper also use layout.ini?
 
R

Richard Urban

To my knowledge the only 3rd party defragmenter that utilizes the prefetch
is PerfectDisk from www.raxco.com. It is currently at version 7.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard :)

If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 

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