Experiment with Diskeeper's IntelliWrite (from PerfectDisk Blog)

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by Chubb, Jan 5, 2010.

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  1. Defcon

    Defcon Registered Member

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    I've yet to see a study/report that proves defragmentation has a measureable effect over time in real world usage, across a large variety of systems. And even more important, any advantage over the builtin Windows defrag which runs automatically.

    IMO defrag and registry cleaners are 2 of the most hyped and least useful optimizations that people spend a lot of time and money on.
     
  2. Narxis

    Narxis Registered Member

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    Almost every defrag software has automatic defrag mode. Defrag is needed because it will take less time to read the data for your system from the HDD.
     
  3. demoneye

    demoneye Registered Member

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    i try Diskeeper for few hours and remove it , it took almost all pc resource while playing some games , force me to quit it and disable it !
    unlike PD which run smooth in any condition :)
     
  4. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    My own tests showed that the performance loss from one months accumulation of fragmentation (from daily office and web development use) was less than the statistical noise (1% in my case) of the benchmarks run (10 times against builtin, diskeeper, perfectdisk and JK), completely unmeasurable.

    There are certain cases where it fragmentation does immediately and noticeably hurt performance (e.g. nearly full disks, editing large media files, p2p downloading), but vast majority of cases performance loss due to fragmentation is mitigated by the generally random access of data on a disk, disk based caching, OS caching, prefetch technology.

    Based on my benchmarks I speculate that the average home/office user who seldom installs anything can run for a few months before getting even measurable performance losses, in 6 months to a year (assuming linear increase) you will only get a few % performance loss overall at most.

    Do anything more intensive (as mentioned above) and my tests showed from my machine used for p2p downloading that copying time increased by 14% for the Ubuntu ISO for example (I cant remember number of fragments but it was over 100 fragments on a 70% full highly fragmented drive).
     
  5. Narxis

    Narxis Registered Member

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    Well, i agree but if you are a gamer u notice performance improvements.

    World of Warcraft with latest patches, addons=15GB
    Star Wars Force Unleashed=10-15GB

    Modern gaming needs lots of space on the HDD, they are selling games on DVD Dual Layer disks.

    But i agree, if u are just browsing the internet, watching videos or listening to music free defrag software or windows built-in defrag is should be enough.

    A few years later when SSD will be affordable(500GB or 1Tb) we won't need defrag softwares.:)
     
  6. ebarcell

    ebarcell Registered Member

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    Michael (from Diskeeper)

    I am uninstalling DK v14.0.0896 (running win7pro x32) because it kept deleting the system restore points (eventhough i had VSS compatible mode on) AND the fact that Raxco's blog attacking Intelliwrite is open to comments but your blog entry touting Intelliwrite is closed to comments. information wants to be free and I don't trust a company that closes comments on its blog while the topic is RECENT and HOT.
     
  7. mmaterie

    mmaterie Registered Member

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    ebarcell,

    I agree with information freedom, and sites like this are a big part of that.

    I re-opened the comments for the post to which I believe you are referring. I closed it because for the weeks it was up, I had only one comment (on Dec 6) - and it was someone making a joke about the post. Not what I consider HOT. I have to sort through a lot of spam comments, so if a blog post is inactive, I close it after a time - to save manual spam deletion work.

    There are, and continue to be, numerous other IntelliWrite posts available for comments.

    If you are having issues of any kind, we have support staff to help.

    On that note, IntelliWrite's approach does not need to move data after it is written - which is what can cause activity with technology like VSS and similar types of tools. "If" defragmenting after the fact is, or appears to, cause unwanted side-effects, users can always leave IntelliWrite ON and turn automatic defrag OFF. There are certain enterprise storage environments where this is the recomended practice.

    I hope this helps,
    Michael

     
  8. Kees1958

    Kees1958 Registered Member

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    Ahh Nick, love your pragmatism :thumb:

    No real time defraggers on my rig, nothing beats a quiet disk with as little as activity as possible. Let's be real: big powerpoints above 5MB are often filtered out by company networks, so only real big data are the large media binaries for private use only. Since those large binaries are updated very little, chances of them being fragmented is very low, so why bother
     
  9. captainron

    captainron Registered Member

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    I also don't want to run a real time defragger or extra processes for defragging in Windows 7 since the built in defrag takes care of that when the system is idle and seems keeps the hard drive very responsive.

    Windows disk defragmenter is much improved, can anyone tell me what file types the 3rd party tools do that Windows 7 doesn't?
     
  10. Narxis

    Narxis Registered Member

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    I think Windows 7 built-in disk defragmenter "just" defragmenting, no optimizing by how often a file is being used.

    But here is a complete list directly from PerfectDisk in pdf: Download
     
  11. Noob

    Noob Registered Member

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    I've tested almost every defragger i could get my hands on (Remember they are a few mb's)
    And the only one i liked was O&O V12, nice interface, easy to use, does a good job, can see files order. :D
     
  12. Az7

    Az7 Registered Member

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    mmaterie,

    Is IntelliWrite compatible with exFAT, and Compressed NTFS file systems ?
     
  13. pajenn

    pajenn Registered Member

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    The IntelliWrite feature seems very nice - I'm trying it now and I haven't noticed any added burden to resource use. Too early say if it significantly reduces fragmentation on my system.

    Does it conflict with any other programs? For example, Acronis says not to run chkdsk or defrag when running the system in their Try & Decide mode; How does IntelliWrite play with Try & Decide or virtualizers like ShadowDefender or Returnil?

    As for Diskeeper's automatic (background) defrag feature, it's the best of it's kind I've tried with the possible exception of DirMS/Buzzsaw (still need to configure them for a proper test), but that said I cannot stand automatic background defrags. The noise alone of my hard disk going dut dut dut dut... drives me nuts... You plug in a 1.5 TB external hard drive that's 65% fragmented and it's dut dut dut dut forever... You shut off everything to do something sensitive and few minutes later your drive is going dut dut dut dut...
     
  14. Noob

    Noob Registered Member

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    Constant moving of big files or thousand of files can benefit from defragging.
    And people that download a lot :D

    My FSX folder have 53K files, WIHOUT a single Add on. I know lots of people that play FSX that have like 10-20GB of add ons.
     
  15. mmaterie

    mmaterie Registered Member

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    Sorry for the late reply. compressed files - yes. ExFAT - no, but planned for a future release.
     
  16. mmaterie

    mmaterie Registered Member

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  17. MaxEntropy

    MaxEntropy Registered Member

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    On my notebook PC, Diskeeper 2007 automatically eliminates around 1500 file fragments per day on the 80 GB system partition. It's therefore not hard to work out what the state of this partition (which has 64% free space) would be without regular defragmentation.

    Having installed a 7200 rpm drive, I wouldn't want it to become effectively less (and possibly much less) than 3600 rpm owing to fragmentation. So, for me, the cost of Diskeeper (spread over several years) has been worthwhile to squeeze the best performance possible from my hard drive . Expect I'll buy the latest version with Intelliwrite etc if/when I can afford to buy a ThinkPad X201.
     
  18. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    Actually it is hard to work out and one reason I hate one off (time-wise) benchmarks - you need to compare not defagging VS regular defaggin over a reasonable time frame of regular use.
    Fragmentation could stay at around 1500 file fragments as its the same files that have fragmented or files that are frequently created and deleted (eg temp internet files), you just do not know without doing some in depth analysis of various usage patterns.
     
  19. MaxEntropy

    MaxEntropy Registered Member

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    Although this is true in principle, I don't think it's the case for my particular system, which I use for work and not just for surfing the web. Moreover, Windows Update and installing new software produce sporadic spikes in the number of file fragments of 7000-11000 per day - far above the daily average.

    If money were no object, I'd buy an SSD to boost my laptop's performance. However, since they're so expensive (and have a limited capacity), I settle for squeezing the best out of my existing hardware. Diskeeper makes a useful contribution to that.
     
  20. DOSawaits

    DOSawaits Registered Member

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    I love these commercial defrag wars, now X takes the crown, now Y has a new patented method which them the crown owners, and now X has taken the crown again. Bare facts are, current super-patended clever defragmentation technology winner will gain you 16ms (milliseconds !!!!!!) over a full 24-hour computer-use period. Talking about making an elephant from a bacteria.:D
     
  21. MaxEntropy

    MaxEntropy Registered Member

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    As a scientist, I too am interested in facts, bare or otherwise.

    According to Western Digital, it is a fact that my hard drive spins at 7200 rpm, which equates to 8.3 ms per revolution. So, your 16 ms per day saving amounts to just 2 extra disk revolutions. Do you think that's a fair estimate of the daily effect of disk defragmentation on a typical system? If not, then you should perhaps choose your sources of *bare facts" more carefully.
     
  22. Arkham

    Arkham Registered Member

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    I happen to like the auto defrag and background defrag prevention features. Never noticed a problem since I installed it a couple of months ago. TBH, my filesystem was already maintained pretty fragmentation-free with the previous versions. It all works quite 'invisibly' AFAIC, no noticeable overhead.
     
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