best defrag tool or method?

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Paul

I am using Diskkeeper and it is not making a dent in the fragmentaiton of my
disk.

I have 42GB with 16GB free. I have run diskkeeper continuously for a day or
two and it makes almost no difference to percieved speed of file opening or
the drive map fragmentation.

What works better and is free or trial?
 
The windows defragmenter is sufficient.
There is very little performance improvement after defragging.
 
Actually in todays pc world one should defrag almost daily.........Thier are
various methods however.1st,one must run diskclean up,the best way is to
go to run,type:CLEANMGR /SAGESET In the new properties window select
all,close out.Return to run type:CLEANMGR /SAGERUN After this,you should
run clean up in cmd,Type:CLEANMGR Once thru type:Defrag C: About every
week,in system properties,select "no page file " for C: Close out restart
pc.
Back in xp,run the 2 cmds in cmd,after reinstall page file.With this
method,you
will see the diffrence................
 
Andrew - What exactly, are you smoking?

To the OP: If you are seeing little difference, then most likely your files
are not that fragmented.
Unless you do a lot of installs/uninstalls, downloading, moving files, etc,
on a regular basis, you do not need to defrag very often, once a month would
probably be more than enough.
 
I have tried XP defragger, full Diskeeper, Norton, and Perfect Disk. Except
for Perfect Disk (by Raxco), all are fairly slow every time. And, in as
little as a day of seemingly doing nothing XP can show significant
fragmentation.

One difference is that Perfect disk settles for defragmenting files without
trying to slide every file towards the front of the disk. It squeezes out
most free space, but not all. Another difference is that it groups files by
age, placing newest files towards the end of the contiguous disk space.
Older files are placed nearer the beginning of the disk.

Perfect Disk runs fairly slowly the first time, but then much faster on
successive usages. And, fragmnetation between usages is mostly due to
assorted XP temp files, system restore images, etc. These come and go and
are hardly worth try to defrag much. Longer-lived system files (windows EXE
and DLL) and user data get defragged and stay defragged.

Now all that said, on a modern computer you would have to have a high
percentage of fragmented files to impact the performance. Even if the
multi-color fragmentation maps have a lot of red, fragmentation may not be a
serious hit on performance. Remember that those maps are not fine enough
to accurately distinguish between a few big files each in two pieces versus
thousands of little files each in many pieces.

If overall performance is not what you want after using any of the above
mentioned defragger, then look elsewhere to improve it. For example, add
RAM. XP loves RAM. Separate user data from system files by placing all
user data on a separate partition, or even a separate physical disk. If you
have video on the motherboard, get a separate video card. CPU speed is
rarely an issue for most things, except processing video. Likewise RAM
speed is not something that a user will sense.

Faster disks might help. But, if the disk controllers on the motherboard
are less than ATA/100, you could install a separate PCI-to-ATA controller,
then the faster disks. All modern disks support at least ATA-100. If you
get new disks, go for a large cache memory on the disks. And, even ATA
disks of any sort are becoming a bit obsolete. The newest thing seems to be
SATA, which can be much faster. They come in two speeds, relative to the
ATA/100, SATA-150 and SATA-300. Of course, they need SATA controllers, not
ATA controllers, but again there are PCI cards for that.

As for file opening, much of that may be overhead to open the program that
opens the file. I find WORD to be especially slow to open, independent of
file size or disk fragmentation.
 
'Andrew E. wrote, part:
| Actually in todays pc world one should defrag almost daily.........Thier
are
| various methods however.1st
_____

As usual, 'Andrew E.' manages to post worthless information in reply to
questions he does not under stand.

When using Windows NTFS as the file system, 5% ~ 7% fragmentation does no
harm; get up above 10 % and you begin to observer slower file loads. After
defragmentation some files will continued to be fragmented, 'System Restore'
points are crammed in to take advantage small bits of free space, as the
files are rarely used, and then only once, so they don't need to load
quickly. This type of 'intelligent' storage of seldom used files saves
larger free space chunks that do benefit from contiguous space.

The advice from 'Andrew E." is more a mismosh things heard in pre NTFS days
when hard drive had capacities in the 10s of MBytes.

Phil Weldon

| Actually in todays pc world one should defrag almost daily.........Thier
are
| various methods however.1st,one must run diskclean up,the best way is to
| go to run,type:CLEANMGR /SAGESET In the new properties window select
| all,close out.Return to run type:CLEANMGR /SAGERUN After this,you should
| run clean up in cmd,Type:CLEANMGR Once thru type:Defrag C: About every
| week,in system properties,select "no page file " for C: Close out restart
| pc.
| Back in xp,run the 2 cmds in cmd,after reinstall page file.With this
| method,you
| will see the diffrence................
|
| "Paul" wrote:
|
| > I am using Diskkeeper and it is not making a dent in the fragmentaiton
of my
| > disk.
| >
| > I have 42GB with 16GB free. I have run diskkeeper continuously for a
day or
| > two and it makes almost no difference to percieved speed of file opening
or
| > the drive map fragmentation.
| >
| > What works better and is free or trial?
| >
| >
| >
 
Bob Harris said:
I have tried XP defragger, full Diskeeper, Norton, and Perfect Disk.
Except for Perfect Disk (by Raxco), all are fairly slow every time. And,
in as little as a day of seemingly doing nothing XP can show significant
fragmentation.

One difference is that Perfect disk settles for defragmenting files
without trying to slide every file towards the front of the disk. It
squeezes out most free space, but not all. Another difference is that it
groups files by age, placing newest files towards the end of the
contiguous disk space. Older files are placed nearer the beginning of the
disk.

Perfect Disk runs fairly slowly the first time, but then much faster on
successive usages. And, fragmnetation between usages is mostly due to
assorted XP temp files, system restore images, etc. These come and go and
are hardly worth try to defrag much. Longer-lived system files (windows
EXE and DLL) and user data get defragged and stay defragged.

Now all that said, on a modern computer you would have to have a high
percentage of fragmented files to impact the performance. Even if the
multi-color fragmentation maps have a lot of red, fragmentation may not be
a serious hit on performance. Remember that those maps are not fine
enough to accurately distinguish between a few big files each in two
pieces versus thousands of little files each in many pieces.

If overall performance is not what you want after using any of the above
mentioned defragger, then look elsewhere to improve it. For example, add
RAM. XP loves RAM. Separate user data from system files by placing all
user data on a separate partition, or even a separate physical disk. If
you have video on the motherboard, get a separate video card. CPU speed
is rarely an issue for most things, except processing video. Likewise RAM
speed is not something that a user will sense.

Faster disks might help. But, if the disk controllers on the motherboard
are less than ATA/100, you could install a separate PCI-to-ATA controller,
then the faster disks. All modern disks support at least ATA-100. If you
get new disks, go for a large cache memory on the disks. And, even ATA
disks of any sort are becoming a bit obsolete. The newest thing seems to
be SATA, which can be much faster. They come in two speeds, relative to
the ATA/100, SATA-150 and SATA-300. Of course, they need SATA
controllers, not ATA controllers, but again there are PCI cards for that.

As for file opening, much of that may be overhead to open the program that
opens the file. I find WORD to be especially slow to open, independent of
file size or disk fragmentation.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your most helpful explanation and advice.

The problem I am trying to solve is the slowness with which the system
operates. I regularly run spybot and adaware and defrag. I am very tempted
to use a newly purchased hard drive to reinstall everything and start over.

Ideally, there would be a program where you could clone the system you have
and move it to a new hard drive and that emliminate the speed issues and
defrag at the same time.

Thanks again/
 
Paul said:
Thanks for your most helpful explanation and advice.

The problem I am trying to solve is the slowness with which the system
operates. I regularly run spybot and adaware and defrag. I am very
tempted to use a newly purchased hard drive to reinstall everything
and start over.

Ideally, there would be a program where you could clone the system
you have and move it to a new hard drive and that emliminate the
speed issues and defrag at the same time.

Thanks again/
Click to expand...

I am still using Diskeeper version 8 and it defrags my 120 gig drive pretty
fast, perhaps their is a problem with your files for diskeeper, have you
tried uninstalling it and a reinstall?
 
MAP said:
I am still using Diskeeper version 8 and it defrags my 120 gig drive
pretty
fast, perhaps their is a problem with your files for diskeeper, have you
tried uninstalling it and a reinstall?
Click to expand...

Uninstall & reinstall Diskkeeper? How would that help(asking seriously so I
understand)?
 
Uninstall & reinstall Diskkeeper? How would that help(asking seriously so I
understand)?
Click to expand...
Generic answer: If a given program becomes corrupted, uninstalling
it, and then reinstalling it (from the original files/disc) should
result in a clean, properly-operating program.

Alan

==

It's not that I think stupidity should be punishable by death.
I just think we should take the warning labels off of everything
and let the problem take care of itself.

--------------------------------------------------------
 
Paul said:
I am using Diskkeeper and it is not making a dent in the fragmentaiton of
my disk.

I have 42GB with 16GB free. I have run diskkeeper continuously for a day
or two and it makes almost no difference to percieved speed of file
opening or the drive map fragmentation.

What works better and is free or trial?
Click to expand...

Hi Paul
If I have missed this idea, I apologise.
I have seen in these groups, but alas, for moment I cannot find the post,
that some AVs are so intrusive that they hold-up defrag.
I have no idea why, but nearly two years ago, I suffered from slow defrag.
I had McAfee AV on a system with 60GB and 20% free space.
It was suggested I went off-line/disconnected from the net and disabled the
AV.
I can confirm defrag was much quicker. And DiskCleanup was faster too.
Rgds
Antioch
 
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