is there a better XP Defrag..?

[David Candy]

Don't get smart. It's true that you don't HAVE to as you well know. Can you cite any examples of where fragmentation causes a crash (apart from the guy who had a swap with tens of thousands of fragments - one could exceed available physical memory to manage the fragments)? I mention this cause I was searching google yesterday and kept finding advice to run defrag to fix crashes.

It's a pity that the Fat32 team didn't fix NTFS (and as far as I know Fat32 on NT) as 9x Fat32 drivers looked for 500K contigious space before writing. The calculations would be far easier on NTFS with its Bitmap (ie free cluster) file.

The other point Kelly is making is with the automatic optimisation and file caching, fragmentation isn't that big an issue anymore anyway. Most of your used files ARE defragmented and caching reduces any penalty for the rest.

And I'm a happy PD customer. If you would only keep out of memory until I decide to run you (and then remove yourself from memory when finished).
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Kelly,

You might want to let Microsoft know this as they will need to re-write
several of their white papers regarding Windows XP and the effects of
fragmentation on performance

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File Systems

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

Fragmentation rarely causes system crashes. The only thing that can cause Windows to crash is a hardware issue or a driver that "isn't playing well". It is rare to find a driver that chokes on fragmentation and causes Windows to crash.

What fragmentation DOES do is slow down things. File caching can mitigate to some extent the effects of fragmentation but consider this. In order to cache the data, the data first has to be read and if it's fragmented, it takes longer to read. There typically isn't sufficient memory to completely cache every piece of data on a drive. With this being said, fragmentation IS designed to happen - and it does happen. While the file system has gotten smarter through the years in trying to be better about creating files contiguously, fragmentation still happens. It doesn't mean that Windows is "broken" - it just means that the file system/drive isn't performing to its best possible speed. What you do need to consider is the effect of fragmentation on different types of aplications - for example the effects of fragmentation (file and free space) on video capture and playback - where it has been recognized for years that fragmentation causes issues.

Automatic optimization only occurs if the system is considered idle AND if there is a sufficiently large enough piece of contiguous free space for Windows to "move" all of the prefetch/layout files into - which means that for many people, it doesn't end up happening.

From "the horses mouth":

- http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/evaluate/xpperf.mspx - look under the section titled Evaluation Issues. You will notice that Defragmentation is first on the list.

- http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/benchmark.mspx - look under the section titled Disk Efficiency Optimizations
"Even though the disk layout optimization does insure some files will be defragmented, it is not a complete substitute for fully defragmenting the disk. Users should still defragment their drives regularly."

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.



"David Candy" <.> wrote in message Don't get smart. It's true that you don't HAVE to as you well know. Can you cite any examples of where fragmentation causes a crash (apart from the guy who had a swap with tens of thousands of fragments - one could exceed available physical memory to manage the fragments)? I mention this cause I was searching google yesterday and kept finding advice to run defrag to fix crashes.

It's a pity that the Fat32 team didn't fix NTFS (and as far as I know Fat32 on NT) as 9x Fat32 drivers looked for 500K contigious space before writing. The calculations would be far easier on NTFS with its Bitmap (ie free cluster) file.

The other point Kelly is making is with the automatic optimisation and file caching, fragmentation isn't that big an issue anymore anyway. Most of your used files ARE defragmented and caching reduces any penalty for the rest.

And I'm a happy PD customer. If you would only keep out of memory until I decide to run you (and then remove yourself from memory when finished).
--
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http://webdiary.smh.com.au/archives/_comment/001075.html
=================================================

Kelly,

You might want to let Microsoft know this as they will need to re-write
several of their white papers regarding Windows XP and the effects of
fragmentation on performance

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File Systems

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.