Best Defragmenting Tips and the Future /w SSDs

Best Defragmenting Tips and the Future with SSDs by Trebuin

If you’re reading this, you already know what a defrag does. What I’m addressing today is the evolution of defraggers and how it applies today and will in the future. We have focused very little on the specific benefits and have held ourselves back as you will understand shortly.​

Defragging was originally designed to defragment files so they can be accessed in one sweep of the hard drive head. This originally applied to individual files and was great for individual file calls. Keep in mind that the beginning of the disk is the outside and is the fastest as more area passes on the outer edge of the disk. This also assumes that the area is filled from the outside of the disk on each plate first before moving further in.​

Today, we have a few methods of defragging: ​

1) We defrag files as we have in the past. Pros: This is the fastest method. Cons: This is the least efficient defrag method.
2) We defrag files and move most frequently modified to the end of the disk. Pros: This keeps non-modified files from fragmenting and gives them speed. Cons: this slows your disk write speed for all future writes down and is dependent on how far inside your disk the free space starts.
3) We defrag files and move most frequently accessed to the beginning of the disk. Pros: this is probably the most efficient speed wise. Cons: This allows for fragmentation and some of those files are modified.
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Your major defrag programs (Perfectdisk & Diskeeper) employ these types of methods. What most lack is the ability to perfect option 3 above, creating option 4 below. These methods were designed for file servers where individual files are important. File servers aren’t launching games that span sever Gigs in size, they're there for people to store and access files. Databases could be an exception here, but the network transfer rate will probably be slower than the lag induced by fragmentation.​

UlimateDefrag:​

4) Move the files you need to respond fast to the beginningof the disk. Pros: If you have program files here, your larger games will load up to half the time. If it's Windows, windows will boot faster. This is relative to where your files are located originally. Cons: Still prone to fragmentation if files change.​

I know of two programs that provide option 4 and give you incredible performance. One is the freeware “JKDefrag” and the other is “Ultimatedefrag” (UD) by Disktrix. Both give you the option to consolidate files as you want…giving you the ability to assigned a performance category and an archive category. Don’t think that JKDefrag is a bit short…I wouldn’t promote this as there’s one better option that both have. UD also provides the classic organization as listed in the three options above. Now, the most powerful is provided only by UD: the ability to consolidate and organize by folder.​

UltimateDefrag:​

This gives you more than just “performance” and “archive.” Performance sticks the stuff on the outer edge of the disk, which archive for UD sticks the data on the inside. Archive for JKDefrag sticks the data immediately after the performance files rather than at the slowest part of the disk. By sorting by folder, you are given unlimited control of how to sort the folders. This is most powerful because as a user launches a program or loads an area of a program, it access files usually in the same folder. This gives the ability to reduce disk thrashing (the head of the hard drive sweeping across the disk to search for multiple files). The server methods don’t provide this level of organization.​

JKDefrag can only achieve this level by programming “spacehogs.” This is JKDefrag’s archive. Everything else would be performance. Again, JKDefrag does not currently have folder sorting so the user is left to sorting everything else using server defragging.​

I used UD for over a year now and have found this the best for overall performance: First I set all the archive files, stuff that is huge and I don’t have a high demand for fast access. The first group of these are Videos and Music files. Next is the individual files that don’t need the performance: everything I have in “My Documents,” “Desktop,” “Downloads, “Pictures,” ect. This is basically all the user profile with the exception of the hidden “App Data” folder as parts of programs are stored in there. As the world moves more digital, these will cover most of your drive. It’s about 50% of mine. The next group are files that are pretty much not accessed: Winsxs folder inside windows is a good one as it is designed as a backup for compatibility reasons and can consume greater than 10GB of space. MSOCache is another as it is a backup of Office and only used for updates. I then threw in JKDefrag’s recommendations of windows\downloaded installations, downloaded program files, ehome, help, ime, installer, softwaredistribution, and speech. I disregarded fonts as I load fonts first to speed windows boot time. ​

After this, I set up the performance files. This is the rest of the files and the order is up to the users. A gamer would place the “program files” folder first. A tweaker would set “windows” first for improving boot speed. Whatever you have loaded first will have the fastest load time. Perfectdisk and Diskeeper have not offered anything to this level.​

The only argument of this is that for some operations, files could be scattered throughout the disk. UD is worst as if you’re accessing both performance and archive files, you’ll get a lot of disk thrashing and this could actually hinder performance. JKDefrag avoids this as the archives will pretty much be the center of the disk. ​

This is about as far as defragging will go today, but with the arrival of Stead State Drives (SSD), defragging is being seen as unneeded. This is very true for a few reasons:​

1. SSDs have limited writes so you don’t want to be moving data around all the time.
2. SSDs have a constant performance; it does not need to seek data.​

Future SSDs should provide over 100 times more writes than they currently do. When this happens, defragging will enter a new era: You’ll want your data equally fragmented across each memory chip. The theory here is that with the data equally stored on different chips, you won’t bottleneck at the number of pins each chip has. Imagine having a chip with 5 pins out. You have 20 1’s and 0’s of data to get out of a single chip. This would require four series of transmissions to pull that data out, plus the data seek transmissions into the chip to get that data. Now if you had that same data scattered equally across four chips, the four transmissions could happen at the same time and that data can be retrieved four times faster. ​

Some people have begun constant defragging of external hard drives. I would recommend here that you check your transfer rate across your connection. My external transfers at 25MB/s via firewire. The slowest part of the disk inside is 50MB/s. Defragging would provide little to no benefit in this situation.​

So in the future, we might actually see fragmentary programs arriving for SSDs to increase performance. There you have it. I hope you learned something and have a great day!​

Respectfully
Treb

 

Thanks for the insightful post, T.

Mind sharing an opinion on O&O Defrag?

 

O&O seems to have similar features to Perfectdisk. It includes defragging files, frequently modified first, frequently accessed first, and sort by alphabetical order.

I should put defraggers in one of two categories:
1) Maximize defragmenting and preventing further fragmentation.
2) Maximizing file performance.

Most of your professional defraggers (O&O, Perfectdisk, Diskeeper) load on boot to monitor files and sometimes defrag on idle. JKDefrag and UD both do not have that feature, they integrate into the screensaver instead as an option.

Basically, O&O looks like another great server defragger, but not for maximizing performance.

 

Thanks for the response.

I s'pose this explanation provides reason as to why I noticed no significant performance increases in overall response time.

 

www.defraggler.com is a free alternative.

i especially love it for the ability to just defrag the fragmented files, not doing any optimisations for speed and such. this is great for data partitions and external drives (as even on an external drive, an accidentally to 100s of pieces split file can be very slow to access). and it's great to just defragment the accumulated fragments on the systemdrive, too.

what's espencially great about it (compared to jkdefrag f.e.), it does gain you performance at the first full defrag, but doesn't make performance worse over time. a jkdefragged drive seems to boot very fast afterwards, but gets tons of disk-trashing after a week or so. defraggler has a quite good performance for long.

great article btw. your presented app looks nice and sounds like a great one. then again, i'm step by step moving to ssd's in my environment, so for the time being, i won't need to dive much into defragmentation currently. (that, as you stated, my change again in the future, as ssd's get more commodity)

 

I've used jkdefrag for a little while but haven't noticed any thrashing. Disk thrashing shouldn't occur like that unless the problem is tied to your prefetched files. Could also be a layout.ini conflict issue with windows which can either be disabled by disabling window's automatic defrag (which should be disabled anyhow) or using a program that respects it (UD does).