Defragmenter Software

What do you use on Large drives

[herb]

We put in a bunch of 160GB drives. If takes forever to defragment them. Had been running them at night but as the disks start reaching about 50 percent capacity they don't finish before people start arriving in the office. Someone ends up shutting them down because it brings everything to a crawl.

Anyone have any experiences with a good software.

[drbrain]

Your best bet is to switch to a better filesystem that doesn't fragment itself, like UFS. (Yes, NTFS is prone to fragmentation problems.)

For most NTFS servers a process runs in the background and constantly tries to keep the disk clean. This is the kind of thing you want to have running all the time, because it's able to keep up with the poor choices the OS makes.

[MattyMoose]

We put in a bunch of 160GB drives.

Did you put the drives on a central server used to share files? That's what I'm assuming.

Have you considered scheduling the defrag on weekends? That way you may be able to avoid people getting interrupted by it and vice versa.

-MM

[DaveAtIFG]

Diskeeper on NTFS for a heavily used desktop here. I set it to defrag in the background every few hours on heavily used drives and longer intervals for less busy drives. It has a "self schedule" feature too, based on fragmentation level but I've never used/needed it. I'm very happy with the product.

[herb]

Tried Diskeeper right after Executive Software took it over from DEC. Had nothing but problems with it at that time. That was about 3-5 years ago and it may have changed/improved. I don't even remember what the problems were but do recall the frustration. They also supplied the technology that MS used in their built-in defrag product which is useless on a large drive.

I'm locked into NTFS on Win2K servers.

Weekends don't work because we have a staff that does.

Guess I'll take another look at the current version of Diskeeper

[DaveAtIFG]

I'm using V7 over W2K. If memory serves, V6 went thru quite a number of releases, bug fixes, etc, before it ran as advertised. It never had any data loss problems.

I think V8 is current and AFAIK, it was primarily an XP "compatibility upgrade" with a few new features thrown in that I don't need.

[Leosghost]

the new diskeepers are so fast and very unbuggy ..
You might also ask henryO ( member here ) I seem to remember that he makes a defrag ..might even be diskeeper?

[henry0]

Hello Leosghost,

You have a good memory :)
Here is the story
It regards Wins 98
On a tech site that I co-own we found and supported
that replacing the 98 defrag by 2k defrag was saving a great deal of time (at least 200%)
However we got a nice letter from MS lawyers asking us not to support that nice trick any longer
at least we were happy that MS had any regards for us!
Henry