[mso] Re: Defragging and outlook.pst
- From: Mark Mucher <mm@xxxxxx>
- To: mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 15:31:54 -0400
BTW, Diskeeper Lite (free) is by far a superior defragger (
http://www.diskeeper.com ).
Mark
Greg Chapman wrote:
>Your real solution is to defrag a little more often. The fragmentation
>of the file has more to do with how large the file is and how often it
>is fragmented rather than where it is stored. Optimization for
>localization to a specific region on the disk is pretty much an esoteric
>consideration for the problem you describe. Note that cleaning the file
>of aged/unwanted goodies and then compacting it occasionally will help
>reduce the size of the file and makes the need for writing it in
>non-contiguous ways a little less frequent. However, the existance of
>the fragments indicate the file is growing on an as needed basis and
>really has no unused space to speak of. XP is the best at this so far as
>the PST tends to clean up nicely without help when you delete a lot of
>messages.
>
>If you're using speeddisk, it sounds as if you might be on a non-9x OS
>(okay, written another way, it sounds as if your OS has an NT kernel and
>file system). If that's so, be aware that NTFS fragments faster than FAT
>and does take a significant performance hit in the early stages of
>fragmentation. However, once you get past 10% fragmentation on this file
>system, performance degradation occurs at a much lower rate. So your
>best investment is simply to regularly defrag the drive on a more
>regular basis. Once every week or two should be sufficient.
>
>I rarely worry about the location of files on the disk based on drive
>geometry. My preference, where possible, is to keep files that are used
>together stored together. That method allows more time to be spent
>reading the data from disk instead of losing time to moving the heads
>across the platter. There's also this to consider (and it's tough to
>explain);
>
>All sectors on a disk are physically the same size. So, on a track that
>is closer to the spindle/hub, fewer data segments will be found than the
>farthest track from the hub. Since all sectors are the same size and the
>outside track of the disk has a larger diameter, this only makes sense.
>Therefore, if you want fewer head movements to read the data of a large
>file, move this file to the outside of the disk. If the files are small,
>though, you can place them wherever you want but its better to try to
>save that outside sector for those really large files.
>
>If you're wondering why all those sectors are the same size and how this
>wild series of questions about where to store a file come from, consider
>this example. Draw a large circle on a piece of paper. For convenience's
>sake, make the circle about as large as the bottom of a standard coffee
>mug. In the center of the circle, draw a circle about the size of a
>quarter and fill it in. Yes, you may use a crayon if that makes this a
>fun exercise for you.<g> The little circle represents the spindle or hub
>of your disk platter (most hard disks have 3-4 platters). The big circle
>is the outside edge of the platter disk.
>
>Now, starting from the spindle area, draw another circle enclosing the
>hub that is about a quarter of an inch larger than the hub. Make another
>circle enclosing the circle you just made. Keep on doing this until your
>last circle is about one quarter inch smaller than the first big circle
>you drew. We'll call these tracks for the time being. Before you do
>anything else, repeat this same procedure on another piece of paper so
>that you now have two pictures of a disk platter.
>
>Okay, with the first picture, draw lines across the disk as if it were a
>pie that you were slicing into 8 pieces. Now you should have 8 pie
>shaped pieces of disk, each of them broken into little bands about a
>quarter inch wide. Those toward the big end of the pie slice are longer
>than the ones closer to the center, right? If each of these were to be
>considered a sector, it's obvious that some are larger than others and
>that they can't all hold the same amount of information if storage is
>based on how much room you have (if you have an attic or a basement then
>you already know without a doubt that storage space is a function of
>size, no matter how you slice the pie<g>). Obviously, this is not an
>efficient way to divide the storage.
>
>So with that second picture of a disk, do this: Start from the hub of
>the disk and drawa line between the hub and the next circle. Measure
>about an inch from that line and draw another line. Do this until you've
>divided that inner circle into several similar sized pieces. At the last
>line you drew, extend the line to connect it to the next circle out.
>Make this longer line much thicker than the rest of your lines so that
>you can see it more easily than the rest of the lines you've drawn. In
>that new ring, again, draw lines about an inch apart. When you've made
>it all the way around, again, draw a thicker line that ties to the next
>outermost ring. Repeat this entire procedure until you have made your
>way all the way around the outside ring with these little lines.
>
>Now you have a picture of how data is actually stored on your disk. Each
>of the sectors are about the same size and each line that extends from
>one ring across to the next represents the end of one track and the
>beginning of another.
>
>Get the idea? This makes it really easy to tell how much a disk will
>hold, too. The formula is based on how many heads (or readable platter
>surfaces) multiplied by how many cylinders (tracks) multiplied by how
>many sectors per track (or cylinder) multiplied by how many bytes can be
>stored in each sector. So a disk with 16 heads, 1024 cylinders, 63
>sectors per track and 512 bytes per sector holds 528,482,304 bytes or
>(528482304/(1024*1024))= 504 megabytes. BTW, this formula was also the
>standard specified in the original IDE drive spec provided by Western
>Digital in WD1003. That's right, the original IDE specification only
>allowed for a hard disk to be as large as 504 megs. I bought my first
>drive of this size in 1994 and paid $320 US for it. Times have certainly
>changed...but the math and the logic behind it still hold!
>
>I know, this is much more than you wanted to think about but hang on to
>it. You may find it helpful when you try to answer a question like this
>for yourself in the future.
>
>Greg Chapman
>http://www.mousetrax.com
>"Counting in binary is as easy as 01, 10, 11!
>With thinking this clear, is coding really a good idea?"
>
>
>
>
>
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