Mark F said:
I find that if I use the Windows XP Professional built in defragementer (alone) I get better
results than if I use one of the add on products.
I dont bother to defrag at all.
(I've used Windows XP Professional with Service Page
2 with Raxco Perfect Disk, O&O Defrag and Diskeeper.
I have used Symantec Norton Utilities Speed Disk and System Mechanics with Windows 98 and/or
Windows 2000, but not more recently.)
The products from three of the companies, Symantec not among them,
have killed my operating system because the defragmenter programs had bugs, even though each
claimed to be able to defragment the files
Windows (and Symantec) didn't defrag. One of them did this on Windows XP Professional With
Service Pack 2, but it was the only defrag program I used on a Windows XP Professional system's
system disk, so the others ones that killed things earlier may still kill things.)
One problem is that the vendors of the defrag programs don't understand how to organize things.
The problem is that you dont need to defrag.
One even says that the layout aren't pretty.
Well, the fact is that for most home users a pretty layout is the most important because it makes
the operations that look at large parts of the disk run faster
No it doesnt, and no home users use systems like that anyway.
and be more predictable. You need good performance in lexical order so that backups run faster
No you dont, and the speed of backups is irrelevant, anyone with
a clue does that when the system isnt being used so minor differences
in backup time are irrelevant. And anyone with a clue does incremental
backups anyway and those arent affected by defragging.
and searches can be terminated earlier.
Mindlessly silly. Its never going to be possible for a defragger
to organise the files on a hard drive so that is possible.
Also, typically it is better if the sequential read speed is only 50%-75% of the potential speed,
rather than range from under 5% to 100%.
Gets sillier by the minute.
As a test, I tried copying 30 to 100 GB of data in 30000 to 150000 files from one disk to another.
Completely useless test, because no one does that sort of thing
often enough for the time to matter. There is absolutely no point
in mindlessly furiously defragging to improve the time that takes.
And it isnt even possible for a defragger to optimise that time anyway.
All 3 of the products that I tried on Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 resulted in a
disk structure that took much longer to copy than to restore to a new location from a "container"
file backup made by NovaStor NovaBACKUP Professional.
Dont believe it, and its irrelevant even if it did.
(This was in about 2006 February, so thing might have changed by now. Also, difference between
copying and restoring from container file was less than the difference between restoring from
container file and copying the container file.)
Gobbledegook.
(Disclaimer: I would like the layouts to be neat,
More fool you.
because a) it makes debugging easier in some cases
Not even possible to be both neat and fastest.
and b) I like things neat.)
More fool you.
