Discussion on:

Don't forget to defrag

I must concur with your views on closing applications, but it should also be borne in mind that any disk activity can fall foul of the defrag! In my experience, it's better to defrag (servers) at night when there's no user activity - otherwise, system hangs might become common-place.

To expand your analogy of changing the oil on the car, defragging whilst there's disk activity is like trying to change the oil on the move: Dangerous!

Don't forget to run ScanDisk (NT's Version of it, that is) every two weeks as well. Yes, it requires a reboot to run, but it is well worth it.

I recently had a client who religiously ran Diskeeper Lite Defrag every week, but never let NT check his hard drive for errors. Needless to say, he lost everything one fine day.

Hi TechRepublic members,

This information is vital in win NT environment. Unfortunately i think am too far from development coz' am hearing most of these things for the first time: they have not reached this part of the world, Nairobi-Kenya. The office PC takes forever to open a website and i cannot afford my own.
Anyway i will keep being informed thro' techrepublic however the hinderances.

J. Kibata

Sorry to say that the diskeeper lite leaves alot of fragments. Even the full diskeeper works best only at boot up, before windows GUI starts.
I found that a better defrag is done by Symantec Speedisk or the latest Norton Utilities, even when working inside the windows GUI.

oded@travelcafe.org

I agree with the release of Speed Disk 5.0 Norton's product has moved ahead of Diskeeper. It does not require reboots to do a full defragmentation. While there are a few features that the latest DiskKeeper has that Norton Speed Disk doesn't [like being Win2000 compatible]Speed Disk's ability to do a full defrag without a reboot makes it more valuable than DiskKeeper 5.0 in my book.
I've been running it on all kinds of production NT machines without any problems since its release [including Exchange and SQL Servers]. One thing i don't like about it is the System Management Center that comes with Speed Disk for NT Server its way too intrusive for my tastes luckily Speed Disk can be installed without the System Management Center.

To compare with Norton Speed Disk, Diskeeper really is somewhat hyped. I tried to run Diskeeper continuously on a network server whole night and it still reported drive being heavily fragmented in the morning. Speed disk took 2 hours to complete thesame task resulting 0,1% fragmentation! Plus disk map really shows file placement that is understandable not for rocket scientist only. Very flexible configuration is a serious argument, too. Warmly recommended.

OK, Seems that not even Symnatec can give us straight info on this product... After finally finding out what we need to be compliant in our LAN, we are now wondering if anyone has extensive knowledge of running this with NSC (Norton system Center).Seems if you want to get a visual of your actual defrag process or be able to analyze a drive you need to install it directly on the local machine. We ran jobs from NSC but we can't figure a way to actually check progress. How do we know this drive is really defragging (other than the drive LED activity)? As with most other Symantec products (their own tech people even admit this) their manual for this product (ver.5.1) is lousy. We like to be able to run the defrag jobs from an administration machine and not directly on the servers but we would also like to have that visual the way that Diskeeper does. Any suggestions?

Thank you very much!

I found that Diskkeeper Lite would leave fragments if using the NTFS filesystem. It seems to clean them out 100% in a FAT partition. Given the recent security implications of NTFS (virii in file streams) the venerable FAT still seems to have some life in it after all.

I have been told that NTFS partitions should not be defragged. This is the explanation as I recall it.

FAT and NTFS are two very different file systems. FAT stands for File allocation Table which means a section of the disk is sectioned off and a table is placed there to define the location of each part of each file that saved to that disk, FAT does not concern itself with where files go on the disk because that?s what the table does. File segment sizes vary depending on the concurrent space available on the disk, and the actual size of the disk over all, but never less than 2048 bytes.

In the NTFS (New Technology Filing System) files are broken down into 512 byte blocks and stored on the disk. Each block contains a footer that tells the hard drive where to find the next block in the file on the disk. I think this footer bit is skipped when the next block is concurrent to it, though I'm not sure.

When you defrag a fat partition the defrag program writes the updatedinformation to the actual table. NTFS is already pretty well organized; because of it's standardized size. You don't need to optimize or defrag it and by doing so your chance of corrupting data go up greatly because of the way the defrag programs handle the footer instead of a table.

In support of this theory, I have had an NT network in place for over three years, it has never been defragged or optimized, and I have no problems what so ever. I have a workstation that was made completely useless by disk keeper being used to defrag an NTFS partition containing App software. I had to reinstall NT and most of the applications on it to revive it. I only know that the workstation gave a BSOD during defrag and never booted again.

when you go to format the drive, NT may not default to the 512 size. It seems to be dependent on the disk size as to what comes up as default. This can be selected at the beginning of the format. There is a "Default size" selection, but no indication to what that size is. I have always opted to use the manual setting of 512 to insure.
To defrag or not? The only time I have defraged on a consistent basis is if I was modifying the page file size. If you enlarge this file without defragging first and not enough contiguous space is available for the page file, performance can be drastially affected depending on the amount that is placed in fragmented areas. This is increasingly true with Win2000, as it will try to dynamically increase the page file should it run low on memory. I usually devote a partition of appropriate size for page file purposes and nothing else, or set the pagefile to a set size. (Was also convienent to use a 500 or 1Gb drive before they became scarce).
Other than that, I rarely defragment, and my system performance does not seem affected. I noticed more of a speed increase by doing away with Fastfind and all it's hidden files.

I have been reading all of the postings and articles about defraging an NTFS and FAT system, but am unsure as of yet what the real deal is. Should you or should you not defrag an NTFS file system? Does a drive become fragmented even if a partition only contains Apps (i.e. that partition does not have any stored files, they are stored elsewhere)? I would concur that NTFS systems do not "seem" to need the defragmentation, but do they really? I am just trying to figure this one out and have been getting mixed signals from across the board. Thanks.

Yes, NTFS (as well as FAT) partitions need defragmenting. There are numerous articles by both Microsoft and other Windows performance experts that strongly recommend this - I can provide links and references if you would like (a good place to startis Microsoft's Technet).

The file system doesn't know what is "apps" and what is "data" - only that there are "files" and that they can be in multiple logical pieces. As "files" are added/removed/grow/shrink, then not only files can become fragmented, but the freespace can become fragmented as well - which forces new files to be created in a fragmented fashion.

- Greg/Raxco Software

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk 2000 defragmentation software, as a systems engineer in the support department.

I thank you for your prompt and helpful
response. If you could send me a few links
for this topic matter, I would greatly
appreciate it. I like to read up on anything
and everything. Thank you again for your
help, and I have always thought the same
about the whole app vs. data discussion.

~Cameron Marshall

How NTFS Reserves Space for its Master File Table (MFT)
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q174/6/19.ASP

Best Performance: Windows 2000 Professional
http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/win2000/bestperf.asp

The Art and Science of Web Server Tuning with Internet Information Services
5.0
http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/iis/iis5tune.asp

Assess and enhance the performance of your NTFS volumes
Sean Daily
Article from Windows NT Magazine
http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/winnt/optntfs.asp

Systems Management Server 2.0 Administrator?s Guide
Chapter 18 ? Maintaining SMS Systems
http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/sms/Manuals/smsadm/part4/smsad18.asp

Windows NT Server 4.0 Advanced Technical Reference
http://www.que.com
Library of Congress Catalog No.: 97-66487
ISBN: 0-7897-1167-2
Chapter 32 Windows NT Server Performance Optimization

Hi all,

I've been using O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware Edition since I had a problem with my disk being so fragmented that Diskeeper Lite would not defragment it. This software is available at:

http://www.oo-software.com/

Once there, click on Products and you'll see it in the list.

Best,

Susan Gross