Number 204 - May 2000

NT Defragmenters: Diskeeper vs Speed Disk
by Howard Hulen, Feb 2000 Sacra Blue Contact Howard Hulen at tips@toptips.com
This article by member Howard Hulen is the result of a question he raised during a recent Q&A session at our General Meeting. Howard would like to share his solution with other members.     When Microsoft introduced NTFS (NT File System) a few years ago, it said that NTFS was so advanced that it didn't need to be defragmented. So the company did not provide a way to do it. However, all PC file systems (FAT, FAT32 and NTFS) will become fragmented over time.     I have a Windows NT 4.0 Workstation with three logical hard disks. After two years, my hard disks were getting fragmented, particularly my C drive. I could see a degradation in performance. Since Windows NT does not provide tools for either measuring or fixing a fragmentation problem, I downloaded Diskeeper Lite from Executive Software.at www.diskeeper.com     Diskeeper Lite did in fact confirm and report that I had a major fragmentation problem. It did improve the defragmentation of the D and E drives somewhat but did little to improve the C drive, which is 2 GB with about 19 percent free space. It reported that I needed to install the full Diskeeper 5.0 instead of Diskeeper Lite, which I did.     But Diskeeper 5.0 (full version) also did little to improve this drive. It reported that I needed to free up more space and try again, yet even after doing this, I ended up getting the same message. Even when I had freed up about 30 percent of the drive (i.e., 600MB), it still reported "not enough free space" and would not, or could not, run.	Logic and years of experience told me that 600MB of free space should be enough, so I installed Norton's Speed Disk from Symantec at www.symantec.com. Speed Disk also reported a major fragmentation problem, but the report was in a different format. Although Diskeeper's report format is more readable, Speed Disk gave the more accurate report, noting that it was my free space that was badly fragmented. More importantly, Speed Disk fixed the problem! I was not aware that NTFS allowed free space to be fragmented. It seems that Diskeeper does not consider fragmented free space to be usable free space.     Once Norton's Speed Disk fixed my fragmented free space, Diskeeper could run. But by that time I did not need it anymore because Speed Disk had solved all of my problems. Diskeeper seems to do a good job if you have lots of free space that is not fragmented. However, if your disk is in very bad shape to start with, then Diskeeper just gives up.     Speed Disk also optimized the disks by moving frequently accessed files to the beginning of the disk, and moving infrequently used files to the end of the disk with free space in the middle. This conflicts somewhat with Diskeeper's operations. Diskeeper took an hour to rearrange a disk that Speed Disk had optimized by moving all of the free space to the end of the disk, which did not improve the disk and may slow down your data input/output.     I understand that a version of Diskeeper is bundled with Windows 2000, so I am not sure of Speed Disk's future. Norton claims that Speed Disk works with Windows 2000, and I am sure that it does, but there is a natural conflict with Diskeeper's arrangement of files. If you have Windows 2000 and use Speed Disk, how much time will you waste rearranging files? Only time will tell.
Number 204 - May 2000