WTF -- defrag actually slows down my system!!!!

[Guest]

I’ve just spend the last 2 days reloading my system multiple times and
testing performance. What I believe I’ve discovered is that defrag actually
slows my system down – way down.

Here’s what I’ve got; Intel P4 2.8GHz, ASUS P4PE w/Promise 376 FastTrak
onboard RAID, Seagate ATA133 74GB disks. The single disk is accessed thru
the Promise chipset but not in a RAID configuration.

I’ve been using the Passmark performance test and other empirical
observations of system activity to measure the performance.

On a freshly install XP SP2 – all the latest updates – the benchmark shows
about 50MB/s for sequential reads and writes. The tell tale empirical
measurement is the time during the boot process that the white progress bar
at the bottom of the screen is displayed. On a new system that bar never
appears!

After defrag: the benchmark shows 50MB/s writes and 5-7MB/s reads. The
progress bar takes 5 to 8 seconds during the boot. (Other observed
performance indicators are: the windows explorer can less than a second to
appear on a new install, and 5 to 10 seconds when it’s bad).

Here’s my theory; defrag has screwed up the layout of the data on the disk
so that every 4K transfer takes one revolution. (writes work ok because of
the write cache in the disk).

So, my question is: are there any parameters to defrag that describe the
desired block layout?

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I've just spend the last 2 days reloading my system multiple times
and testing performance. What I believe I've discovered is that
defrag actually slows my system down - way down.

Here's what I've got; Intel P4 2.8GHz, ASUS P4PE w/Promise 376
FastTrak onboard RAID, Seagate ATA133 74GB disks. The single disk
is accessed thru the Promise chipset but not in a RAID
configuration.

I've been using the Passmark performance test and other empirical
observations of system activity to measure the performance.

On a freshly install XP SP2 - all the latest updates - the
benchmark shows about 50MB/s for sequential reads and writes. The
tell tale empirical measurement is the time during the boot process
that the white progress bar at the bottom of the screen is
displayed. On a new system that bar never appears!

After defrag: the benchmark shows 50MB/s writes and 5-7MB/s reads.
The progress bar takes 5 to 8 seconds during the boot. (Other
observed performance indicators are: the windows explorer can less
than a second to appear on a new install, and 5 to 10 seconds when
it's bad).

Here's my theory; defrag has screwed up the layout of the data on
the disk so that every 4K transfer takes one revolution. (writes
work ok because of the write cache in the disk).

So, my question is: are there any parameters to defrag that
describe the desired block layout?

I think you worry too much about too little.
If you want a better defragmentation option, but the full version of the
product included with Windows.