This issue of INSIGHT ON WINDOWS® NT/2000/XP contains:

By John L. Joseph, Diskeeper Development Section

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article he read on the Internet, which actually said:

"In general, don't defrag too frequently. You can wear out your hard drive if you defrag too often. Unless you uninstall a bunch of programs or do a lot of video and audio editing, only defrag every few months—sooner if your drive is more than 20 percent fragmented."

There are actually multiple fallacies in this one. Let's dig in.

Fallacy A: "Only defrag every few months—sooner if your drive is more than 20 percent fragmented."—The first fallacy here is that anyone will actually remember to do this.

No one in their right mind puts an entry in their Calendar to defragment on the 31st of March, the 30th of June, the 30th of September, and the 31st of December.

Advising this indicates the writer thinks the only good defragmenter is a manual defragmenter, which of course, means he thinks the only good defragmenter is the built-in defragmenter, which doesn't have a scheduler. If you've used the built-in defragmenter, you know that it's got serious limitations. On 95/98/Me, the built-in defragmenter restarts whenever some other process accesses the disk. So, in effect, it never finishes. In Windows XP, the built-in defragmenter won't operate when the free space gets low, and has trouble defragmenting files that need a large amount of contiguous space.

What most people don't realize is how fast fragmentation accumulates on their computer. This graph is the result of a little experiment I did during a period where I was just using Internet Explorer and Word. It's not a file server; it's just my little old desktop machine.

Note that each test starts with zero excess file fragments. That means that each line represents the fragments in only the RECENTLY created or modified files; in other words, they're the files I was using THAT DAY. The old files were defragmented. It's the new files that get fragmented. So the fragmentation accumulates in and affects the files I can least afford to have perform poorly.

Fallacy B: "Only defrag every few months—sooner if your drive is more than 20 percent fragmented."—It is a fallacy to believe that you can wait a few months before checking to see if you have greater than twenty percent fragmentation.

If you wait a few months, your disk volumes may be more than 20 percent fragmented, so you really have to run the disk analysis every few days or a week to ensure you're not more than twenty percent fragmented. So your Calendar for 2004 DOESN'T have four entries to defragment, it's got fifty or more, because you're going to want to run the built-in defragmenter every week to see if you've exceeded the twenty percent guideline.

Of course, running a disk analysis every few days or weekly is a MANUAL task. Again, this is unnecessary if one is using an automatic defragmenter.

The real problem, however, is that the built-in defragmenter is SLOOOOOOOW and resource-intensive.

So what the writer is really saying is that he doesn't want to lose the use of his machine very often and that he'll succumb to the use of the built-in defragmenter every few months.

Also, using the “twenty percent” figure is horribly misleading. Remember, fragmentation accumulates in the most recently used and modified files. So you could be 100% fragmented and not realize it!

If you use Diskeeper's Smart Scheduling™ you don't have to manually analyze every week and you don't have to manually defragment every week.

Fallacy C: "Only defrag every few months"—The fallacy here is that a few months is an acceptable period of time to endure non-optimum performance on your machine.

Let me share a little experiment. I turned off automatic defragmentation on my desktop computer (2.4GHz) on Friday, and when I came in on Monday, I did my usual start-of-week actions. One of the things I do is to run Ad-Aware, a program that hunts down and removes spyware from my system. On Monday, when I came in, I timed how long it took Ad-Aware to deep-scan my system. It took 56 seconds. I didn't have it remove any items after this scan. I then defragmented my boot volume, and re-ran the Ad-Aware deep-scan. This time it took 35 seconds. That's a 40% reduction in elapsed time!

Do you run a spyware hunter on your machine? Do you run an antivirus on your machine? Take a look at this graph:

Yes, it can take HOURS to run an antivirus scan on a volume with tens of thousands of files!

If you keep your machine defragmented, you'll SAVE TIME in running the necessary maintenance functions on your machine. I'm not talking about saving time in running your applications, that’s a given; I'm also talking about the time and resources you'll save in these maintenance functions like spyware purging, antivirus scanning and performing backups.

If you wait a "few months" to defragment, the fragmentation accumulates to the point where these simple maintenance tasks take longer and longer to run. This is NOT what you want. I don't even have to survey you individually to know that. Nobody paid good money for their machine and software to have it run at below-optimum performance.

Fallacy D: "You can wear out your hard drive if you defrag too often"—This is, on its face, a fallacy.

I've heard this for years. I have never seen an actual test done that proves it! It’s simply something that injects FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) into your life.

What I KNOW is this—if I have a file that's in fifty fragments, and I access it twice a week for three months, that's a total of 1,200 head movements. If I defragment the same file, it's up to 100 head movements at the time it gets defragmented, but it's only 1 head movement every time I look at it for the next three months. 100+24 = 124 head movements.

The head can move 1,200 times for that file in three months or 124 times in the same period of time. Which situation will lead to the drive failing sooner?

Yep. The one that wasn't defragmented.

Of course it’s easy to take the advice of some “authority” without actually inspecting the situation. And it’s really easy to “just use the built-in defragmenter”, except that no one remembers to do it. After all, it’s “free”. Manual defragmenters usually get run about an hour after the computer’s user has placed a call to Tech Support or the Help Desk because it’s part of the standard way to get a computer running again. And if the system has been neglected it takes HOURS to defragment it.

The better solution is to use an automated background defragmenter that spruces up your disk volumes, keeping them running at optimum performance without manual intervention or evaluation as to how fragmented the system is.

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—TechnoClarity, Inc.

Time is a luxury I don't have and using Sitekeeper speeds things up tremendously. I use it a lot to push out all the security updates for Windows. I also like the software inventory because it lets me keep track of what is on each and every system at the office. I would definitely recommend it to others, especially if you don't want to spend your whole life looking at the Windows update page.
—Magnum Pacific Inc.

The "Set it and Forget"® it feature of Diskeeper—all of our administrators love this feature   Having a reliable scheduler take care of the fragmentation issues of our servers means that I and the other administrators can focus our attention elsewhere without having to worry about the disk status. For years we were primarily a Novell shop and we were accustomed to the NetWare OS handling the defragmentation of the drives. Since the transition to Windows, fragmented volumes have been a major concern since server performance can suffer. Diskeeper has taken that concern away since we know it's being taken care of without daily interaction or the need for weekend hours just to take care of a "defrag." Fortunately, all of our Win2K servers are recently installed and have had Diskeeper on them nearly from day one. We have not had any stability issues at all. The defragmenter is working great. Our systems support the file, print, web services, and database activities of three USAF organizations. All of our servers have minimal fragmentation now.
—US Central Command Eglin AFB and McDill AFB

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http://www.jsiinc.com/reghack.htm
JSI, Inc. is a tried and true tips and tricks website

http://www.dougknox.com/
Doug’s pages contain tweaks and tips for Windows XP/95/98/Me

http://www.webtechgeek.com/Windows_2000_tips.htm
WebTechGeek.com has a special Windows 2000 News Reviews & Tip Page

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