A
Andrew Borland
Help,
I'm trying to get a grip on defragmentation issues for my NTFS
formatted C:\ Drive under windows XP-Pro SP1. This is still a
development installation so dangerous experiments are permitted.
I have installed the demo versions of both Disk Keeper 8 and Perfect
Disk 4 for evaluation.
In each tool, there appear to be a number of "system files" scattered
about on the disk which the tool is unable/unwilling to move, along
with a huge chunk on each disk labelled "reserved/mft". These combine
to greatly reduce the amount of contiguous free space - thus preventing
optimisation of the pagefile.sys and/or hiberfil.sys files.
Partition is 16G, Pagefile is 4G and Hiberfil is 2G. 8G is free.
RAM is 2G.
I have managed to achieve a degree of defragmentation by disabling
virtual memory and hibernation and then deleting and recreating the
associated monster files, but this isn't something I would want to do
more than once. Even then, I still failed to achieve a truly
contiguous result on account of those unmovable bits.
Is there a recognised bible (novice level) on how XP manages its disks,
and how best to build a system with good solid contiguous monster
files?
How would the experts here suggest that I tackle the problem? I can't
believe I'm the first to go down this road, but I don't see anything
much in the archives.
Historical note. Under windows 98 I use Norton SpeedDisk which appears
to be able and willing to move smaller files (even if not fragmented)
to one end of a partition to lave a large contiguous space at the other
end into which it packs the swapfile. Finally the disk was left with
no gaps between files. Are there good technical reasons why this
cannot be done under NTFS?
Regards, Andrew Borland (UK)
I'm trying to get a grip on defragmentation issues for my NTFS
formatted C:\ Drive under windows XP-Pro SP1. This is still a
development installation so dangerous experiments are permitted.
I have installed the demo versions of both Disk Keeper 8 and Perfect
Disk 4 for evaluation.
In each tool, there appear to be a number of "system files" scattered
about on the disk which the tool is unable/unwilling to move, along
with a huge chunk on each disk labelled "reserved/mft". These combine
to greatly reduce the amount of contiguous free space - thus preventing
optimisation of the pagefile.sys and/or hiberfil.sys files.
Partition is 16G, Pagefile is 4G and Hiberfil is 2G. 8G is free.
RAM is 2G.
I have managed to achieve a degree of defragmentation by disabling
virtual memory and hibernation and then deleting and recreating the
associated monster files, but this isn't something I would want to do
more than once. Even then, I still failed to achieve a truly
contiguous result on account of those unmovable bits.
Is there a recognised bible (novice level) on how XP manages its disks,
and how best to build a system with good solid contiguous monster
files?
How would the experts here suggest that I tackle the problem? I can't
believe I'm the first to go down this road, but I don't see anything
much in the archives.
Historical note. Under windows 98 I use Norton SpeedDisk which appears
to be able and willing to move smaller files (even if not fragmented)
to one end of a partition to lave a large contiguous space at the other
end into which it packs the swapfile. Finally the disk was left with
no gaps between files. Are there good technical reasons why this
cannot be done under NTFS?
Regards, Andrew Borland (UK)