Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Saturday 2008-02-16 at 17:04 -0500, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
In my recent experience having admin duties for some XP machines while I was in Baghdad, defragging took several hours for some NTFS partitions in the 40G - 60G range.
I have always thought that this defragmenting thing could be speedied a lot. It shouldn't take much longer than reading and writing 40*2 GB. It could be done against a spare disk, for instance, in chunks of 1..20 GB, provided the machine has a good UPS. Even without it, if ram is 2 GB, it could be done in 1GB chunks. Years ago I was thinking of writing my own defragmenter for vfat... but I never started.
MS's defragger is some very poorly designed code. It works by a very "brute force" methodology, and has no intelligence to it. Norton's defragger is much better...it not only optimizes disk head movements of the defragging process, it ALSO allows you to specify certain file types to be towards the beginning of the partition (optimizing access to those files) and pushing towards the back of the blob of blocks that are in use those files which tend to, or are most likely to be modified again. The first time you defrag a disk with Norton's software, it takes an extremely long time...but once it's done, the defrags take significantly less time, and also result in a filesystem layout which is quite well optimized (provided that you do things like specifying the *.exe and *.dll be put to the front)
The question for XP admins is if that task is really worthwhile; I mean, if having a computer off-line for several hours with heavy disk activity and wear, as compared to been perhaps a small percent slower in normal use.
User's don't like waiting around for MS-es pathetically slow OS to fidget around even more due to ultra-pathetically-slow disk access. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org