Diskeeper settings??????

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roo
  • Start date Start date
R

Roo

Hi,
getting a new 120 gig WD hard drive fitted next week, the old 1 year old
40 gig died, taking all to the grave.
My question is running diskeeper on a large drive with not much on it
and having it set for "Set and Forget" to come on with screen saver, is that
not a bit of over kill, will it do the drive any harm getting constantly
defragged.

Is leaving your computer on all night offline, is that giving it more work
than shutting down and starting up each day.

Is it wise to get a batch file to operate when shutting down to save "My
documents" and any other crucial folders to a secondary drive.

Non Tech Roo
 
Roo said:
My question is running diskeeper on a large drive with not much
on it and having it set for "Set and Forget" to come on with
screen saver, is that not a bit of over kill, will it do the
drive any harm getting constantly defragged.
Click to expand...

Defragging is dangerous to your data. All sorts of nasty things
can happen, such as power failures (handleable with suitable APSs)
and soft memory failure (handleable with ECC). The soft memory
failures are the most evil, because you may not know anything went
wrong for months or even years.

Thus a defrag should be preceded by a full backup, and then
watched with care, trepidation, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Don't do it without indications of the necessity.
 
Defragging is dangerous to your data. All sorts of nasty things
can happen, such as power failures (handleable with suitable APSs)
and soft memory failure (handleable with ECC). The soft memory
failures are the most evil, because you may not know anything went
wrong for months or even years.

Thus a defrag should be preceded by a full backup, and then
watched with care, trepidation, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Don't do it without indications of the necessity.
Click to expand...

I don't agree that the defragmentation in Windows XP (and Diskeeper) is
that scary. On an NTFS disk it seems remarkably bulletproof. It will
even run quite happily and unobtrusively while you are actively reading
and writing files to the disk. I have used it for three or four years
and never had a problem.

As a programmer I run frequent recompilations that cause large numbers
of files on my disk to be rewritten. Some of the files are quite large,
and this leads to fragmentation. I have found through experiment that
Diskeeper's "set and forget" feature makes a noticeable difference in my
compile times by reducing the time required to read the source files and
libraries.

It is true that soft memory failures could lead to data corruption as
data is shuffled around during defragmentation. However that is the
case anytime you read and write files on the disk. To completely avoid
it you must either use ECC memory (as you suggested) or avoid writing
anything to the disk at all.

To Roo: unless you do write files to your disk a lot, running constant
defragmentation probably is overkill. But that is the nice thing about
the "set and forget" feature. It automatically schedules
defragmentation runs less frequently if not much has been written to the
disk.

Jeff Bean
CWC Software
 
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