Disk Defragmenter Utility
As advanced as hard drives have
become, one item they are not very good at is housekeeping, or maybe
that should be drive keeping. When files are created, deleted, or
modified it's almost a certainty they will become fragmented.
Fragmented simply means the file is not stored in one place in its
entirety, or what computer folks like to call a contiguous location.
Different parts of the file are scattered across the hard disk in
noncontiguous pieces. The more fragmented files there are on a
drive, the more performance and reliability suffer as the drive
heads have to search for all the pieces in different locations. The
Disk Defragmenter Utility is designed to reorganize noncontiguous
files into contiguous files and optimize their placement on the hard
drive for increased reliability and performance.
Accessing Disk Defragmenter
Disk Defragmenter can be opened a
number of different ways. The most common methods are listed below.
- Start | All Programs |
Accessories | System Tools | Disk Defragmenter
- Start | Run | and type dfrg.msc
in the Open line. Click OK
- Start | Administrative Tools |
Computer Management. Expand Storage and select Disk Defragmenter
The first two methods take you to a
standalone window containing Disk Defragmenter. The last method
opens Microsoft Management Console and displays Disk Defragmenter as
one of the snap-in modules. In all cases, a window similar to the
one below will be displayed.
When Disk Defragmenter
first opens (Fig. 01) you'll see a list of the hard drives displayed
at the top of the screen. The Estimated Disk Usage Before
Defragmentation and Estimated Disk Usage After Defragmentation will
be blank until a drive is selected and the Analyze button is
clicked. In the screen shot above, I've already analyzed the drives
as evidenced by the Session Status showing as Analyzed and the
Estimated Disk Usage Before Defragmentation area containing a
graphical representation of the drive fragmentation.
After the Analyze
button has been clicked and the process completes the window shown
above (Fig. 02) opens with a brief recommendation of what action
Disk Defragmenter thinks should be taken regarding the drive. It's
important to note that this is just a recommendation based on the
percentage of fragmented files to total files and doesn't prevent
the drive from being defragmented if you feel it needs to be done
and might improve system performance. If you want to go ahead and
defragment without more information, click the Defragment button. If
you're in agreement with their recommendation and don't want to
defragment, click the Close button. Click the View Report button to
view a more detailed drive analysis.
An Analysis Report
contains quite a bit of additional information about the selected
drive. The report shown above (Fig. 03) details the File
Fragmentation status of drive WXP02-D. The top pane provides Volume
information, and as you can see there are 3,851 fragmented files.
This may not seem like many fragmented files, but consider that this
is only a 20GB drive, which is very small by today's standards, and
that 81% of the total drive space is currently unused. Look at the
Average Fragments Per File number of 1.04 and this tells you that
approximately 4% of the files on the drive are in two or more
pieces. My experience has been that when this number reaches 1.05
the message in the quick analysis window (Fig. 02) will recommend
defragmenting the drive. The bottom pane, Most Fragmented Files,
lists the files in descending order that are the most fragmented.
In spite of the
recommendation not to defragment this particular disk, I went ahead
and clicked the Defragment button. The results of that choice are
shown above (Fig. 04) in the Estimated Disk Usage After
Defragmentation section. The graphical representation clearly shows
that not only have the red lines depicting fragmented files been
eliminated, many of the contiguous files indicated by the blue have
been repositioned toward the beginning of the drive, reducing the
amount of searching the drive heads have to do to locate a file. The
drive in this example is not a system drive, nor does it have a
paging file which would be indicated by the lime green Unmovable
Files color.
After the
defragmentation process completes, clicking the View Report button
will bring up the Defragmentation Report (Fig. 05). It takes the
exact same form as the Analysis Report (Fig. 03) but shows the post
defragmentation results. The Total Files and Average File Size
remain identical, but notice that Total Fragmented Files and Total
Excess Fragments have been reduced to zero (0) and the Average
Fragments Per File is now 1.00, indicating most or all of the files
are contiguous. In addition, there are no files listed that did not
defragment.
Additional Disk
Defragmenter Notes
For the majority of
users, the Disk Defragmenter Utility included with XP is sufficient
to keep the hard drives in relatively good condition, but it's
actually what is known as a Lite or slightly crippled version of
Diskeeper, a product made by
Executive Software. You may have noticed in Fig. 04 that even
after the drive had been defragmented, there were still gaps showing
where no files were shown as being present. What are these gaps and
why weren't they eliminated by compacting the files to the beginning
of the drive? It's due to limitations imposed by the Lite version of
Diskeeper supplied with XP. I don't currently have Diskeeper
installed, but look at the images below, created from PerfectDisk
v5.0 by Raxco
Software.
The top image is a
drive analysis of the same drive that was used in the previous
examples. The analysis was performed immediately after the drive was
defragmented using Disk Defragmenter supplied with XP. Using the
Legend shown below, we can see that there are a number of details
supplied that flesh out the areas shown in Fig. 04 as being Free
Space. In reality, this really isn't free space but is the MFT and
MFT Zone.
Now look at the image
directly below the Legend map. It shows the same drive after being
defragmented with PerfectDisk. It shows the same blocks, but notice
that a number of the different legend categories have been moved and
optimized for even better drive performance. This is essentially the
difference between the built in Disk Defragmenter and an upgraded
disk defragmentation program. The more sophisticated programs allow
you to optimize page files at reboot and a number of other options
that are impossible with the stock offering.
Conclusion
If you're an average
XP user the standard Disk Defragmenter utility will do a good job of
keeping your drives defragmented and help to maintain peak system
performance. If you are the type that wants to extract the best
possible performance from a system, consider upgrading to one of the
premium defragmenter products. Most o them have a free trial
available that will showcase the best features each has to offer.
The important point is
that whatever product you decide meets your level of need, it
doesn't do a bit of good unless the drives are defragmented on a
regular basis. Make it a part of your regular system
maintenance.
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