[bcab] Re: Doing a Boot Time Defrag

Brian is correct on the time-frame.

Many factors come into play on speed of defragging.
Some to consider are,

1.   RPM of the drive.  (physical speed is measured in Revolutions  Per
Minute or RPM).

Common hard drive speeds are,

4200 RPM, 5400RPM, and 7200RPM.

On ultra fast drives you can get 1024 RPM, but these rarely if ever come
as standard with a  computer package unless explicitly requested and are
much more expensive.

2.  State and format of  the file system.

If running XP or Vista it is highly recommended that your internal
drives, (i.e. the ones inside your case that you'd not likely to be
wanting to swop in and out to be used on Win 98 and lower), are
formatted in the NTFS file system.

I.e.  FAT32 is an older and less efficient file system and can cause
defragging to take longer.

NTFS has better background maintenance than FAT32 which helps to keep
the file system healthier.

State of the file system refers to how healthy the file system is.

Is there any file allocation errors on the drive?  Is there any bad
sectors on the drive?

Run check disk on the drive and tell it to fix any errors it finds.

Tell it to auto fix file system problems and to also check for bad
sectors if you're concerned.

NB.  It might take an hour or more to run the check for bad sectors
because it will test each sector on the drive and there's millions of
the things.

Any it finds that are bad it will mark as so.  This tells Windows not to
store data on that block in future.

3.  One that's been mentioned many times in this thread how fragmented
the drive is and also how much space is on the drive.

Fragmentation is easier kept at a low level if free space is kept high.

Alexander as I've said in another post I'd set the logs to be generated,
I'd run a boot-time defrag and now that I'm thinking about it I'd also
download C Cleaner from,

http://www.cleaner.com

Run it's cleaning component and it will clear allot of guff of your
drive that will also effect performance of the hard drives, (mainly
inside Windows because of the operating systems poor resource management
and over-heads).

5.  Malware will also effect performance.  This is because it's almost
constantly writing/reading to and from the drives as well as chewing up
CPU.

IMHO, if a system is behaving so sluggish that it's taking long periods
of times to open applications the best fix is a format.  Malware
scanners like Add aware and Spybot etc are good but they can only get so
many and sometimes they have to use brute force to get rid of the
nasty's.  Thus not always leaving the file system in the best state.

I'm not suggesting you go and format because defragging isn't being as
efficient as it might be btw.  Just throwing this out as a factor.

6.  The last time the system was loaded from a  fresh?

If you've been running an OS on a system for anything more than 3 years
and you're always installing and uninstalling software, just download
this and that and trying things out I'd strongly recommend the drive be
formatted and a fresh copy of Windows be put on.

This will effect more overall performance which will include defragging.

NB.  I'd normally say two years but three IMHO is the max.

Barry Toner
Placement Systems Engineer
Liberty Information Technology          Direct Line: 02890 167000 
Adelaide Exchange                       Fax: 02890 445511 
24-26 Adelaide Street                   Switchboard: 02890 445500 
Belfast BT2 8GD                         Email: b.toner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Brian Lingard
Sent: 28 November 2007 20:13
To: bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bcab] Re: Doing a Boot Time Defrag

Ottawa Canada

Dear Alexander and list:

Yes, I meant to say a Boot Time defrag.

Far as I know, you can schedule any drive to be defragmented at boot
time.

But when you boot or reboot your system, it may take several hours for
the various drives to completely defragment.

Brian
Brian K. Lingard
email: b.lingard@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Skype: ve3yiab2ji15
tel: +1 (613) 247-0665
New York NY Tel +1 (646) 797-2862
FAX +1 (613) 247-9998

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27/11/2007 8:30 PM



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