Comments

daryl wrote on 5/18/2005, 11:43 AM
I thi nk it' s agoo d id ea t o def r aag peri o dica l ly , bu t no t a HUG E de a l . Uni x do esn' t see m to ha ve an y pro b lem wit h frag menta ti on.
FuTz wrote on 5/18/2005, 2:28 PM
l o _ !! !
johnmeyer wrote on 5/19/2005, 10:01 PM
Even those who only use the free built-in Diskeeper defrag in Windows can View Log and see which files are fragemented and how many fragments are in each.

The fragmentation report does not necessarily tell you anything about performance. Even on an old disk (1980s), where fragmentation was a problem, if the fragments happened to line up so the head could get to them before the disk completed a revolution, there was very little performance degradation. This "stagger" was really important (and was part of the magic of changing the "interleave," using a low-level disk tool).

Some people (myself included!) get mesmerized during a defrag watching all those little random dots start to get lined up. There is an illusion of creating order out of chaos, and a feeling of accomplishment, not unlike what you feel when you straighten up your room or office.

(Whether you get more work done in a neat office (compared to a messy office) is an interesing OT thread for another forum and another time ... )
JHendrix wrote on 6/12/2005, 5:58 AM
Quote"

2) I use widers search to locate and delete *.TMP, *.bak, *.bk!, *.bk$, *.jbf, *.asv, *.$*, and _Temp_*.* files. These are the junk files frequently left over from lots of operations that are not needed ever again. They should already have been deleted, but the various programs I use create and seldom clean up. I typically find hundreds of each type. Your list of junk files is VERY likely to be different.



How can I do this?

I never have
Coursedesign wrote on 6/12/2005, 11:09 AM
johnmeyer: The fragmentation report does not necessarily tell you anything about performance.

The fragmentation report tells you everything about performance for individual files.

Are you suggesting that you won't have any performance degradation working with a 4.5GB video file that has 638 fragments vs. working with the same file defragged into one continuous file?

I had that exact situation recently, and if you have a way around having to do a defrag in this situation, I'm eager to sit at the Master's feet to learn this.

Perhaps you are trying to develop some kind of metric for "overall disk performance" or something equally odd. This performance will obviously depend on what files you work on next.

My advice: look at the defrag log and see if your key large files are affected, if so do a defrag.

Random dots? So you are using Windows 98?

Finally, I think a lot of people are confusing "windows rot", the continuing degradation of Windows performance after installation, with a simple defragmentation problem. There's a lot more to it than that.