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Time to defrag?
Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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1Volume Main (C:)
2 Volume size = 112 GB
3 Cluster size = 4 KB
4 Used space = 107 GB
5 Free space = 4.40 GB
6 Percent free space = 3 %
7 
8Volume fragmentation
9 Total fragmentation = 24 %
10 File fragmentation = 41 %
11 Free space fragmentation = 7 %
12 
13File fragmentation
14 Total files = 216,585
15 Average file size = 642 KB
16 Total fragmented files = 23,560
17 Total excess fragments = 333,738
18 Average fragments per file = 2.54
19 
20Pagefile fragmentation
21 Pagefile size = 512 MB
22 Total fragments = 2,180
23 
24Folder fragmentation
25 Total folders = 17,741
26 Fragmented folders = 648
27 Excess folder fragments = 2,881
28 
29Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
30 Total MFT size = 232 MB
31 MFT record count = 236,860
32 Percent MFT in use = 99 %
33 Total MFT fragments = 14
34 
35--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
36Fragments File Size Most fragmented files
3719,947 1.24 GB \Installed Applications\Games\Command & Conquer The First Decade\Command & Conquer Red Alert(tm)\MAIN.MIX
3811,872 592 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA.PCK
3911,243 695 MB \Archives\Linux\Mandrake\Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD1.i586.iso
409,047 321 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA2.PCK
415,323 695 MB \Archives\Linux\Mandrake\Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD2.i586.iso
424,931 494 MB \Installed Applications\Games\HELLFIRE\DIABDAT.MPQ
434,831 76 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Soldiers - Heroes of World War II\expansion.pak
444,138 790 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Soldiers - Heroes of World War II\game.pak
453,957 478 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Big Game Hunter 2005 Season\Bgh2005\Data.arc
463,407 146 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Cod2\main\localized_english_iw08.iwd
473,379 79 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\CZ\CZ.Y64
483,017 130 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Europa 1400 - Gold Edition\resources\TEXTURES.bin
492,602 268 MB \Documents and Settings\Novous Tyr.NOVOUS\Local Settings\Temp\pft2C.tmp\pftw1.pkg
502,372 51 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\HL\Hl.Y64
512,112 57 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\KW\KW.Y64
522,088 59 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\IS\Is.Y64
532,042 83 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\SH\SH.Y64
541,815 70 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Stratosphere\data\data0009.zpr
551,801 47 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\BU\BU.Y64
561,736 56 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Stratosphere\data\data0000.zpr
571,657 77 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\SB\SB.Y64
581,389 50 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\WOFIP\DATALKA.pop
591,263 21 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Soldiers - Heroes of World War II\resource\Patch\2.pat
601,028 514 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Deer Hunter 2005\Game\Data.spk
611,000 40 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\SB\SB_N.Y64
62961 35 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\WOFIP\DATALE01.pop
63941 35 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\RY\RY.Y64
64929 147 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Europa 1400 - Gold Edition\resources\animations.bin
65912 192 MB \Archives\Audio\Music 2 (rare case music)\WITH_TEETH\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1.VOB
66814 35 MB \Installed Applications\Games\Commandos II\DATA\MISIONES\SB\SBC00.Y64

... I don't know. Is 19,947 fragments good or bad?

;D

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

well the "average fragments per file" isn't too bad, unless that means every file that is stored in more than one sector is fragmented (doubtful). This is worrying:

Quote:

Total fragmented files = 23,560

Oh, I recently de fragged my data volume, its now getting 40MB/s write speeds. not too shabby eh? Especially for software raid on two plain (couple year old) PATA/IDE drives eh? Read speed is dismal (16-27MB/s) though, not sure why.

oh, managed to just get these numbers:

Write Test: 1024.000000MB in 23.819346 Seconds, 42.990265MB/s
Read Test: 1024.000000MB in 28.774792 Seconds, 35.586704MB/s

:D

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"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

HoHo
Member #4,534
April 2004
avatar

Pagefile fragmentation
    Pagefile size                              = 512 MB
    Total fragments                            = 2,180

Now that is bad. To make things better you could simulate *nix way of swap by creating a whole partition only for the swap.
19,947 1.24 GBHeh, nice one. My record was around 15k fragments for 500M file when I copied something to a drive that had ~10M free space left afterwards ;D
Percent free space = 3 %That is way too little for NTFS to work correctly. Probably only a few file systems can work with so little free space left, if any.

I doubt that defraging helps a whole lot. Sure, it will improve things but probably not by much. If you defrag the drive let us know how well did it work :)

__________
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
MMORPG's...Many Men Online Role Playing Girls - Radagar
"Is Java REALLY slower? Does STL really bloat your exes? Find out with your friendly host, HoHo, and his benchmarking machine!" - Jakub Wasilewski

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

3% is too little for any FS*. But yes a defrag WILL help. a whole hell of a lot, till it fragments again and you spend most of your time seeking instead of reading and writing. Freeing up space and then de-fraging is the best bet.

*) Well, actually that depends on the size of the FS. if its several Hundred GB in size, it might be enough, if its several TB in size, then its definitely enough. ;)

edit, oh and I always try to setup a separate partition for my swap, or at least fix its size to 512MB-1GB in size or so. then its quite hard to fragment it ;)
edit2: if you do put it on its own partition, make sure the FS is larger than the file by a fair bit so as not to get that annoying "out of space" dialog every few minutes.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Matt Smith
Member #783
November 2000

Defragging a drive that full will be murderously slow :p Move some stuff off it temporarily. You would want AT LEAST as much free space as the biggest file, and everything up to half empty will speed it up some more.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Not only slow, but depending on the tool used, impossible. MS's defrag is utterly stupid. restarts on disk access, and cant defrag in many cases.

Try Perfect Disk, O&O Defrag, or Diskeeper (well actually one of them, iirc is made by the same people as the MS defrag... cant recall which)

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

James Stanley
Member #7,275
May 2006
avatar

Why don't you use a file system that doesn't fragment?

Oh, wait, Windows...

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Quote:

Why don't you use a file system that doesn't fragment?

No such thing. Some just fragment worse than others.

A decently recent FS will use some "smart" algorithms for allocating pieces of files as close to the proper place as possible to reduce seeks in loading single files. Even better is an OS that manages to pack related files together to reduce on seeks even further. I saw an article the otherday that put out that Ext2/3's anti-fragmentation algorithms are causing files that would otherwise be allocated close to others that are related (say a bunch in a extracted tar, or a split up multi GB file) are spread across your disk, causing a fair amount of seeking when loading many related files, like your init or kde startup.

A good tool would be able to organize your files selectively, put all your startup files in a contiguous section, your app's data all in a contiguous section each, etc.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
avatar

Quote:

edit, oh and I always try to setup a separate partition for my swap, or at least fix its size to 512MB-1GB in size or so. then its quite hard to fragment it

It's not so bad when it's a fixed file size unless you exceed it (which doesn't happen for me).

Quote:

Defragging a drive that full will be murderously slow :p Move some stuff off it temporarily. You would want AT LEAST as much free space as the biggest file, and everything up to half empty will speed it up some more.

Windows wanted 15%, I got 14.5%. I left it over night and it was still 1% of "compressing files." >:(

Needless to say, I have to drop a few more files.

The reason it's so full is that my 200 GB hard drive is dying so I have to throw most of it on my other two.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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Quote:

The reason it's so full is that my 200 GB hard drive is dying so I have to throw most of it on my other two.

That's what DVD burners are for. :P

Which reminds me that I need to go burn stuff to DVD. I only have 2GB free on my HD.

HoHo
Member #4,534
April 2004
avatar

Quote:

It's not so bad when it's a fixed file size unless you exceed it (which doesn't happen for me).

Then why is your swap divided roughly into 2000 256kb pieces?

__________
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
MMORPG's...Many Men Online Role Playing Girls - Radagar
"Is Java REALLY slower? Does STL really bloat your exes? Find out with your friendly host, HoHo, and his benchmarking machine!" - Jakub Wasilewski

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Quote:

That's what DVD burners are for

That's a ridiculous waste of money per GB of storage space.

Quote:

Then why is your swap divided roughly into 2000 256kb pieces?

Because it was changed at one point. It doesn't just magically move around the hard drive on it's own.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Hard Rock
Member #1,547
September 2001
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Quote:

That's a ridiculous waste of money per GB of storage space.

!!!!!!!! For $30 i get 300GB worth of storage in DVDs. Where do you get your storage? I want a $30 300GB harddrive.

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relpatseht
Member #5,034
September 2004
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Harddrives are, unlike DVDs, rewriteable. Personally, I wouldn't pay $30 for a 300GB harddrive with write once read many sectors even though it would have a much higher write speed than a DVD, though, that may be because I only have $30 and have never used more than 40GB of harddrive space.

BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Quote:

Because it was changed at one point. It doesn't just magically move around the hard drive on it's own.

If you don't set the size explicately, with no room to increase or drecrease, it will move around on it's own.

Quote:

That's a ridiculous waste of money per GB of storage space.

No it's not. DVDs are a good cheap solution for storing backups, even though they have to be checked every year for quality. If it's not read/write, then storing on DVD makes sense.

Or you could use something like Amazon's S3.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Quote:

If you don't set the size explicately, with no room to increase or drecrease, it will move around on it's own.

But I have set it to a fixed size.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
avatar

Quote:

That's a ridiculous waste of money per GB of storage space.

Sigh... I wan't suggesting you use it as permanent storage, but when you're hard drives are failing, it's better then losing stuff.

Billybob
Member #3,136
January 2003

Quote:

Sigh... I wan't suggesting you use it as permanent storage, but when you're hard drives are failing, it's better then losing stuff.

Well except that it isn't permanent. I bet my Seagates will last 3x longer than my backup CD/DVDs.

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
avatar

I don't see much fragmentation on windows even when I don't defrag more often than 3 months. Maybe 53Gb free. Sometimes when I'm just sitting there thinking, the disk drive lights up and seeks like crazy for 20-40 minutes at a time, I was assuming it was doing some sort of defrag automatically. No cron type stuff is scheduled at all.

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
avatar

The indexing service often does that. I've also read that windows optimizes your hard disk while idle (ie. defrags it), but I've also heard that it does no such thing. I don't know what to believe :(

I rarely need to defrag my main drive, but I regularly need to defrag my secondary drives. Data is moved around on those drives much more often and they are usually larger files.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Goalie Ca
Member #2,579
July 2002
avatar

NTFS isn't the most sophisticated file system (it really isn't apologists but it might have been back in the day). Sadly it looks like windows users will be stuck with it for at least a decade to come. Kinda reminds me of IE going stale.

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BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Quote:

Well except that it isn't permanent. I bet my Seagates will last 3x longer than my backup CD/DVDs.

I bet my backup DVDs are more than 3x cheaper than your Seagates. :P

Steve Terry
Member #1,989
March 2002
avatar

1Volume (C:)
2 Volume size = 466 GB
3 Cluster size = 4 KB
4 Used space = 81.34 GB
5 Free space = 384 GB
6 Percent free space = 82 %
7 
8Volume fragmentation
9 Total fragmentation = 24 %
10 File fragmentation = 49 %
11 Free space fragmentation = 0 %
12 
13File fragmentation
14 Total files = 118,845
15 Average file size = 871 KB
16 Total fragmented files = 22,833
17 Total excess fragments = 113,183
18 Average fragments per file = 1.95
19 
20Pagefile fragmentation
21 Pagefile size = 1.50 GB
22 Total fragments = 1
23 
24Folder fragmentation
25 Total folders = 9,164
26 Fragmented folders = 605
27 Excess folder fragments = 5,122
28 
29Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
30 Total MFT size = 127 MB
31 MFT record count = 129,064
32 Percent MFT in use = 99 %
33 Total MFT fragments = 2

;D

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BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Statistics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Volume Files
     Volume size                               = 232 GB
     Cluster size                              = 4 KB
     Used space                                = 192 GB
     Free space                                = 41,368 MB
     Percent free space                        = 17 %

Fragmentation percentage
     Volume fragmentation                      = 31 %
     Data fragmentation                        = 37 %

Directory fragmentation
     Total directories                         = 36,656
     Fragmented directories                    = 591
     Excess directory fragments                = 5,170

File fragmentation
     Total files                               = 469,527
     Average file size                         = 548 KB
     Total fragmented files                    = 26,975
     Total excess fragments                    = 167,811
     Average fragments per file                = 1.35
     Files with performance loss               = 26,939

Paging file fragmentation
     Paging/Swap file size                     = 0 bytes
     Total fragments                           = 0

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
     Total MFT size                            = 528 MB
     MFT records In Use                        = 508,637
     Percent MFT in use                        = 94 %
     Total MFT fragments                       = 21

Job Report
Volume (C:):

Recommendations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Findings on C:

    Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found
    27,567 fragmented files and/or directories and 173,002
    excess fragments.

    The average number of fragments per file is 1.35.

    This volume is heavily fragmented, with 17% of the total
    volume space available for defragmentation. If you haven't
    run Diskeeper on this volume yet, it is time to do so. If
    you have run Diskeeper on this volume, you should schedule
    Diskeeper to run more often than it has been running to
    reduce the current fragmentation and maintain a lower level
    of fragmentation. Also, scheduling Diskeeper to run at
    times when system activity is low improves the overall
    performance of your computer. 
1. Free up space on volume C
    by emptying the Recycle Bin or removing any unwanted
    files.
2. Due to the high MFT usage, it is recommended that
    you expand the MFT on this volume. Use the Frag Shield
    option in the Diskeeper Configuration Properties to
    configure the MFT on this volume to a larger size.
3. Due
    to the high memory usage it is recommended that you run
    Frag Shield to expand your paging file.
4. Defragment
    volume C now using Diskeeper.


Health
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Warning!

    The overall health of volume C: is degraded

    The overall health is at "Warning" level for the following
    reasons:

    1. The MFT usage is currently 94 percent of the total MFT
    size, which indicates it is likely the MFT will become
    fragmented.

    2. The peak memory usage since the last reboot is currently
    90 percent of the total available memory, which indicates
    it is likely the paging file will become fragmented.

    3. The volume is heavily fragmented. The average number of
    fragments per file is 1.35.

    4. The free space on this volume is very low (17%), making
    it difficult to defragment the volume.


Access Time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Time to read all files on volume C

    Current read time:      38 minutes

    Optimum read time:     26 minutes

    30% improvement



    Time to read fragmented files on volume C

    Current read time:      103 minutes

    Optimum read time:     91 minutes

    11% improvement

Richard Phipps
Member #1,632
November 2001
avatar

So, what's the best free defragger to use for Windows XP? :)

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