Vista Defrag

[Frank]

I thought I would let some of you see how well Vista's defrag is working (
at least for me). As you will see below I've been looking at some Vista
defrag software, having problems with some and others great successes.

This is from an earlier post I made:
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I'm trying to run O&O's Defrag 10 Pro software and pretty much the O&O
service will not stay in the start state. I believe this is due to Vista
disallowing interactive services...
I've searched the net for a solution but have found nothing useful.
Does anyone know of a way around this issue?

The O&O website states that it is Vista x32/64 compatible.

Thanks for any input,
Frank
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I contacted O&O about this two weeks ago but I'm yet to receive a reply on
the issue. Since then I've gotten Diskeeper Pro 2007 which is doing a great
job at handling fragmented files.
I thought I would supply two screenshots of how well it is doing compared to
Vista's internal defragmenter;

This one is at the beginning of a DK Pro defrag, just after the Vista's
internal defrag had completed, it shows how well Vista actually preformed on
my drive:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y28/Brap/DK2007PE1.jpg

And here is a screenshot after DK Pro finished it's defrag:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y28/Brap/DK2007PE2.jpg


Regards,
Frank

 

[Robert Moir]

This one is at the beginning of a DK Pro defrag, just after the Vista's
internal defrag had completed, it shows how well Vista actually preformed
on my drive:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y28/Brap/DK2007PE1.jpg

And here is a screenshot after DK Pro finished it's defrag:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y28/Brap/DK2007PE2.jpg

No it doesn't show you "how well Vista actually performed", it shows you how
closely Vista's idea of defragged drives matches Disk Keeper's idea of a
defragged drive. Not the same thing at all. I'm not saying that Vista's
defragger is good, just that you can't measure it that way.

http://robertmoir.com/blogs/someone...-1_2900_-You-can_2700_t-measure-it_2E00_.aspx

 

[Guest]

Well unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot before Vista did its job, but
from what I observed it did barely anything and that shot does show what it
considers an acceptable condition.
My personal opinion is, yes you can measure the performance of a
‘defragger’. Like a workman, it either completes the job right or not at all.
In Vistas case it failed my requirements horribly, and Diskeeper left barely
any fragmentations at all.
Unfortunately, it seems that Vista’s idea of healthy defragmentation on my
drive is an average of 16 fragmentations per file, were DK’s is 1.
That alone, for me, is a valid means to measure one against the other.

Enjoyed your blog post, I agree that the internal ‘defragger’ is adequate
for home users; But in my case I’m far from satisfied with it.

 

[Robert Moir]

Well unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot before Vista did its job,
but
from what I observed it did barely anything and that shot does show what
it
considers an acceptable condition.
My personal opinion is, yes you can measure the performance of a
'defragger'. Like a workman, it either completes the job right or not at
all.
In Vistas case it failed my requirements horribly, and Diskeeper left
barely
any fragmentations at all.
Unfortunately, it seems that Vista's idea of healthy defragmentation on my
drive is an average of 16 fragmentations per file, were DK's is 1.
That alone, for me, is a valid means to measure one against the other.

Enjoyed your blog post, I agree that the internal 'defragger' is adequate
for home users; But in my case I'm far from satisfied with it.

I'm sure the built in defrag is inadequate for "pro" use, though I also
wonder if it's designed to "do a little, but often" rather than just hammer
a drive for two hours until it's all sorted. I'd be very worried if
Microsoft think we're going to keep windows servers tidy with the same
defrag vista has.

For XP and Vista I much prefer Raxco's perfect disk. I just wanted to make
the point that you can't measure performance of two defraggers by using the
'analyse' tool from one of them, as this simply shows the opinion of the
vendor on what constitutes a nice tidy disk layout. I've not done comparison
tests in a long time but when I did use to do this I saw different tools
give different numbers when looking at the same disk.

Would a "smart" layout that moved all the parts of a file to the right
physical locations on a disk for fast reading but left one or two fragments
be better or worse than a layout that moved all the parts of a file together
leaving no fragments, then tightly packed the contents of the whole disk
together with no further thought? All very hypothetical, I know.

 

[Richard Urban]

Well unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot before Vista did its job,
but
from what I observed it did barely anything and that shot does show what
it
considers an acceptable condition.
My personal opinion is, yes you can measure the performance of a
‘defragger’. Like a workman, it either completes the job right or not at
all.

What is "right"?

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[Frank]

In the past I’ve never needed to use anything other than the MS software for
this task - going as far back as DOS; I decided to let the internal defrag
do its job when I got Vista. But whatever has changed this time around,
other than the loss of Ui, allowed my hard drives to become severely
fragmented.

For some people, they don’t care or understand about drive health and access
times, hence the UI change and background task; But when your array is made
up of small file sizes totaling up to 4TB and more, being accessed, copied
and shared within software on the daily basis, this becomes a problem.



I’m running DK on this array and what it showed me is very disappointing for
Vista considering my past experience. Further scheduled tasks were set to
run every weekend in order to keep fragmentation to a minimum. I can’t
understand how this would happen, unless the software, like Robert said, has
a different idea on fragmentation to others – a poor one at that in my
opinion.



As to what is right, I can’t say that I know; All defraggers give false
completion times and defragging an area my not improve performance, the list
goes on when talking about this subject. But what I can say is that DK is
doing a much more impressionable job than Vista – Though far too much
onscreen information, it gives an option to slightly customize the depth and
type of tasks.



I understand that the Vista defrag UI may have been confusing for some
users, even unnecessary and inaccurate in some cases. But in my line of work
it’s best to know before you start using a drive heavily.



Maybe what would be “rightâ€, is to have the choice to shape how it looks and
operates for each individuals system setup, you tell the software what you
consider to be the right form of defragmentation, what information you need
and how to handle your data, not the other way around.



Regards, Frank

 

[Richard Urban]

What I was getting at is this. Install PerfectDisk along with DisKeeper.
Defrag with DisKeeper. Then run an analysis with PerfectDisk. PerfectDisk
will "show" how screwed up your drive is.

Now do this in reverse. Diskeeper will now show you how screwed up your
drive is.

So, what is right?

The only time I defrag with PerfectDisk is before I create an image using
TrueImage. Other than that I allow the Vista defrag to do it's thing,
whenever it wants to do it.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)