The fragmenting of drives

[chrisv]

(snip)

Wrong again, Ron. I'd be surprised if Arno has not noticed that you
always nym-shift and respond to a plonking, and thus simply does not
read your response.

 

[Mark M]

On Wed 13 Jul 2005 23:13:21, Rod Speed wrote:

Both. Modern hard drives seek so quickly that the head move
from one fragment to another is so fast that its not noticeable,
and any version of Win is doing quite a lot with the hard drive
most of the time, even when say just web browsing and caching
all sorts of stuff from web pages that the heads are moving
around a hell of a lot most of the time that the occasional
extra head move from one fragment to another gets swamped.

And the tiny files in the cache dont get fragmented much either.

Hiya Rod. I have a 160 GB download drive which gets its
directories really horribly fragmented. Opening the folder tree
in Acdsee in XP can be very much slower when this fragmentation
happens.

I use PerfectDisk to give me the partition statistics about this.

I don't want to defrag all the data for the reasons you say (and
which I agree with). But I do want to defrag the directories. In
my case unfortunately I have to defrag the whole damn partition to
defrag the directories.

And it does help. No need for test equipment to tell the
difference after it is done. The improvement, only for THOSE SLOW
accesses, is 100% or 200%.

While I am about it I also defrag the MFT and other metadata. I
don't know how much this really helps but I do it as a ritual
anyway!

 

[Rod Speed]

Hiya Rod. I have a 160 GB download drive which
gets its directories really horribly fragmented.

Thats a different matter to true fragmentation,
file that arent in a contiguous run of sectors.

Opening the folder tree in Acdsee in XP can be very
much slower when this fragmentation happens.

Dunno, one obvious possibility is that Acdsee does things
rather stupidly, particularly if you want to see the files sorted by
something that isnt the way that they are stored in the directory.

I use PerfectDisk to give me the partition statistics about this.

Fragmentation of directorys shouldnt have much performance
impact since they should be cached in physical ram. Maybe
you dont have those basics right, the system isnt setup
properly on the directory caching and thats compounded
by Acdsee doing something rather stupid etc.

I don't want to defrag all the data for the reasons you
say (and which I agree with). But I do want to defrag
the directories. In my case unfortunately I have to
defrag the whole damn partition to defrag the directories.

I vaguely recall at least one ute that will sort the
directory entrys, cant recall any names now tho.

And it does help. No need for test equipment to tell
the difference after it is done. The improvement,
only for THOSE SLOW accesses, is 100% or 200%.

Do you get the same result with other than Acdsee ?

Presumably you are using NTFS from the reference to MFT below ?

While I am about it I also defrag the MFT and other metadata. I
don't know how much this really helps but I do it as a ritual anyway!

Yeah, thats the reason most defrag, pure ritual.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Wrong again, Ron. I'd be surprised if Arno has not noticed that you
always nym-shift and respond to a plonking, and thus simply does not
read your response.

Nah, babblemouth obviously relies solidly on his killfile.
That's why he was slow to catch on.
Arnie thinks that when he doesn't read it, then it was never
said, so there is nothing to respond to.