Last night I did a full system backup. On a whim I quick-formatted both of the destination drives (an internal IDE drive and an external USB drive) so that they were absolutely clean when the backup began.

I figured that this would give me 100% non-fragmented files, but this is not the case. My defragger is chugging away as I write this and it will take it several hours to complete, as more than 20% of the files on the newly-formatted destination drives are fragmented.

Why did the files, being written sequentially to a clean, empty drive, end up fragmented? If it matters, when I reformatted the drives I enabled compression.

tanstaafl.

I can't offer any insight, but a cow-orker of mine recently asked offhand if I'd defragmented a fresh install of XP. I thought he was joking. He wasn't.

Matthew

Because Windows has a really poor file allocation algorithm?

While glib, that's probably basically true. The issue is that it probably writes temporary files and then deletes them and then backfills with permanent files that are not the exact same length.

What Bitt said. Enabling compression probably doesn't help it either.

A Vista install should be less fragmented because of the image install system it uses.

I think Bitt answered the question just fine. I'm just replying to find out what you're using for a defrag program. I was under the impression that the one built into Windows isn't all that great.

I'm currently a fan of JKDefrag. I keep a portable version of it on my portable apps drive.

Defraggers do more than simply defragment files -- they also regroup files close to their directories, and eliminate unused gaps of space and such.

Cheers

Some defraggers do. The stock Windows one doesn't.

IObit is the one I use.

Wow!
That looks too good to be true!

Interesting tidbit: One of the biggest players in the Windows defrag market is Diskeeper which happens to be a company whose CEO is a "devout" member of the Church of Scientology. There was a big controversy when Windows 2000 came out because it used a stripped down version of the Diskeeper engine. The implication being that CoS was using Diskeeper to monitor the data on hard drives worldwide to look for things they don't like (i.e. secret documents).

So this thread is a good place to ask this, anyone here use a defragger in a development environment and can recommend one (either free or commercial) that will do well? Doing a simple sync out of Perforce, then compiling a large app really trashes a drive under Windows. The goal would be to have a defragger that is pretty much install and forget (so nothing that has to be manually run), and is smart enough to stay out of the way when the disk is being used. Ideally, it would also move the most accessed files to the faster parts of the disk, using actual benchmarks to figure out where that spot is.

I tried Diskkeeper 2008 on my machine and a few others for their trial, and it seemed to be decent at doing all of this, but searching around, there still seems to be a lot of negative reviews of it for some reason. For me, it seemed to do the job of cleaning things up pretty quickly, often getting the disks back into order if I stepped away for lunch or a meeting.

I'll try out JKDefrag and IObit based on the suggestions here sometime next week.

JKDefrag has a screensaver that will run JKDefrag when the screensaver kicks in. If that's enough idle detection for you, there you go. If not, I don't think that there's anything you can do with JKDefrag that wouldn't require another idle-detecting utility.

The German government made Microsoft strip out all of the Diskeeper code because they consider Scientology to be an anti-constitutional organization.

Idle in this case would need to be based on IO, and not screensaver. It's possible someone will kick off a build and walk away with the screensaver on. At that point, the defrag program shouldn't be kicking in unless the build finishes.

I don't think I ever actually knew that. Very interesting.

I just came across this JKDefrag GUI that allows you to schedule it to run when idle. It doesn't specify what "idle" means (it uses jt.exe from the Resource Kit), but it's worth checking out. (It also incorporates a pagefile defragger, a registry optimizer, a freespace wiper, and a temp file cleaner.)

Really? I don't see much on that page that attracts me to use it as a program. I usually try to stay away from programs that have pages that look like that (there's a good number of them).

Then they make the following statement: "What’s the primary cause of slow/unstable PC performance? It’s disk fragmentation." Um, I don't think so. Maybe if they said "slightly slow/somewhat unstable" then fine, but from what I see, it's spyware/viruses.

Oops, I should have mentioned that I use the GUI. It's quite good.

Did you watch the video? It's hysterical. It sounds like it was narrated by son-of-wild-and-crazy-guy.

Certainly was an "interesting" video. It's a grammatical nightmare though. It reinforced the impression I got from the rest of the website - "sounds to good to be true". The web page was enough for me to say no before the video. Also, when the video says things like "it eliminates long waiting times for large hard drives". Nonsense...

That said, it is free though and the author/owner doesn't seem to want make any money from it.

I would worry about the authors true motivations here. Defrag programs do have complete access to your hard drive remember. If he put in a regular expression looking for credit card numbers in files as it defrags who would ever know?

I tend to make a judgment call on free software by the way its presented. That site leaves me a little...skeeved. At the very least I'd try to find out what other folks on the net are saying about it before using it (not just CNet). I think JKDefrag has been put through its paces pretty well.

I use Auslogic's defragger. It is free, very simple user interface, and it is fast. I've been quite happy with it.

tanstaafl.