O T: Defrag

[the_constructor]

Just deleted 21,00 email from my machine and think it is time for a defrag.

Running XP but defrag in XP is a pile of poo.

Anyone recommend a decent defrag program please. Preferably that is FREE

Jim G

[airsmoothed]

it for me.

[Paul D Smith]

The WinXP defrag tool is fine but expects to do "a little each time". In addition you may need to defrag the page file and other system files. What I do is the following:

1. Make sure that from the "My Computer..." settings, the PageFile has the same Max and Min size (i.e. cannot grow-and-fragment). With most large hard drives there is no excuse to skimp on a small PageFile these days.
2. Run the WinXP defrag at least 3 times, preferably more. If you've hardly ever defragged, create a batch file and leave it running in the background to run it say 10 times.
3. Download "Pagedefrag" from Microsoft (search for "Sysinternals defrag") - this is a boot-time utility which you schedule and it defrags the system AND OTHER files. Do NOT run this before you've run WinXP defrag because otherwise it will sit their defragmenting your entire drive and take days - you use WinXP defrag to ensure there is not much for PageDefrag to do on boot up.
4. Create a Scheduled Task so that each week (1am Sat morning say) to run WinXP defrag 3 times, then schedule a PageDefrag and reboot the box to trigger the PageDefrag. This will keep the hard-drive nice and packed.

Paul DS.

[Davey]

Switch to Linux, then never defrag ever again.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well you maybe should occasionally..

Just tar up the data in single user mode and shove it in a partition elsewhere, delete the partition and reinstall it :-)

Make sure that the tools you need are NOT in te same partition though....

IF you go for a reasonably static / /usr and /lib ..and /opt for those that must..

then /var and /home contain the only 'moving data'

So they can be deleted and resinstalled ad infinitum.

[Tim Streater]

Switch to a Mac, then never defrag ever again.

Amazing the s**te that Windows users put up with and think is "normal".

[The Natural Philosopher]

same coments as Liux. You still need to. But its a lot less frequently needed and a lot less hassle.

[Huge]

Or indeed, any system with a Unix file system in its "DNA" ...

[dennis]

MACs defrag in the background. they move so called hotfiles to defrag them and optimise them. I guess it means buy windows and you really never *need* to defrag, buy a MAC and it will always defrag.

Amazing what MAC users don't know.

As a note..

windows on NTFS doesn't need a defrag, ever, it will still work. However all disk file systems including Linux and MAC can benefit from file optimisation as it reduces the seeks and hence improves performance.

[The Natural Philosopher]

This is worth a read and the follow on article.

makes the very good point that *nix was conceived initially as a multiuser system so lots of people altering files in a random fashion was considered at the start.

I have to say I never de frag. Linus these days. I DID run into issue with what turned out to be an enormous firefox history file that screwed up firefox opening windows. I deleted te history entirely. I domnt need to know where I was two years ago If I didn't bookmark it It wan;'t with being there in the first place.

However I HAVE as part of disk upgrades defragged by save/restore onto new hardware older *nix machines, and a full and fragged disk is for sure a bit slower than a brand new half full defragged one.

What really counts in *nix though is te dis access deamins: They maintain a list of things that need to be written to disk and things that seem likely to need reading from disk, and they do optimised passes over the disk all the time to dump 'what's nearest, first'. And every ounce of spare ram caches the disk especially its directory and inode structures. More ram reduces the need for multiple disk seeks.

But as with most things *nix, when running well, leave well alone. The OD understands fragging and works hard not to do it to start with, and later on, how to not let it result in slower access times.

It used to be you had to RESERVE ram for caching...and sockets,,.and stuff. No longer. Its all done for you by algorithms that are far smarter than you are - until you have spent a few weeks understanding the system..

[Paul D Smith]

...snip...

Glass-houses ;-) The trouble I had getting my mother-in-law's Mac onto a wireless LAN (hidden SSID issues) and then onto a shared printer...

All was sorted by drilling down to the underlying Unix and configuring from there but boy did Apple make things hard by "guessing" what sort of networks a Mac would talk to and not exposing the key options in the Apple GUIs.

Paul DS.

[Thumper]

Defragging in Vista is rubbish too. Was defragging the entire day a few weeks ago. Cancelled it at midnight but had no idea how much had been done. Bring back the old Win95 with the map of blocks being moved about.

[whisky-dave]

But it means YOU as an individual doesn;t have to defrag. The same mhappens when copying a file to and from disc, that's another way of defragging but you don;t have to defrag as it's transparent to the user and that is the point.

I knew. but it's a bit like worryijng that the computers memory is volatile so I have to keep refreshing it. It's no big deal for most computer systems whether it's UNIX LINUX Mac OS X or windows. But as it's done without my intervention I don't really need to consider it.

[Tim Watts]

That's a bit of an old beard's tale. Classic unix filesystems like EXT2 are quite good at mitigating the effects of fragmentation, but they still fragment.

EXT2 has an offline defrag tool, EXT3 has no available defrag tool[1]

[1] It can be downgaded to EXT2 and use that tool, but if there is any EXT3 specific metadata, it will get eaten.

EXT4 supports online defrag as does XFS and probably others.

It's a PITA when your linux server is running on a virtual platform and you really would like to compact the filesystem, and zero out the rest of the fre space in order to take advantage of thin (sparse) disk arrays (ie your zero blocks do not actually occupy any real disk space until they get used).

Cheers

Tim

[Brian Gaff]

Auslogic? Beward the added toolbar or attempt to sell you other software, but I find it quite a nice proggy.

Brian

[Tim Streater]

What is a MAC? I've never heard of one of those.

If defragging is done in the background on behalf of the user, that means, as I stated, that I never have to either defrag or worry about defragging.

[PeterC]

Puran Defrag seems good

what's your e-mail client? The databases need to be compacted as well in some cases. I know how to do so in Dialog and Thunderbird but not others.

[Mr Pounder]

it for me.

And me. But don't make it default. The defrag question is one of the oldest questions in the known world. Nobody really knows.

[Huge]

So run Solaris ... :o)

[Jules Richardson]

If only Windows used ext2! Users would have needed to format and reinstall everything long before fragmentation was an issue ;-)