Low-fragmented image file creation

[Shamus_McFartfinger]

Just to point out I was joking.

I guessed that, as subtle as it was.

[blutach]

Of course, given the drive is 90% full, you probably have little chance of defragging it now Shamus.

 

Live with it or suck about 50Gb off the bastard and then defrag.

 

Regards

[JasonFriday13]

@Shamus

 

My 5 1/4 drive is a leftover from my first computer. It was a 80386 40 Mhz with maths co-processor. 8MB of RAM and 32 bit cpu . Ran windows 95 on it. Originally used it as boot security, so that it would not boot without the 5 1/4 boot disk. I was offered borland C++ 2.0 on seven 5 1/4 disks from high school, because I wanted to learn the language (and because they were giving it away). About three months later, I bought my current machine in pieces and put it together. I decided to add the 5 1/4 drive because I had a spare space and power connector for it. And thats the story.

 

Now, about that harddrive, ARE YOU KIDDING!? A 500 GB drive that is nearly full and tried but failed to defrag since you got it? Get rid of some of those DVDs you have stored on it and burn them to DVDs. You are lucky though. I have a 38.2 GB drive, with 34 GB assigned to Win XP, and 3.5 GB assigned to Win 98 SE

(for old game compatibility). The last 700 MB is free space incase I need to make an emergency partition (don't know what for yet). Your much better off than I am .

 

[edit] And red is slow, VERY slow. Blue is VERY good (blue is also good for your disk) [/edit]

Edited November 2, 2006 by JasonFriday13

[cornholio7]

You are lucky though. I have a 38.2 GB drive

 

take a look at 'information' here http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showuser=4

 

[Shamus_McFartfinger]

@Shamus

 

My 5 1/4 drive is a leftover from my first computer. It was a 80386 40 Mhz with maths co-processor. 8MB of RAM and 32 bit cpu . Ran windows 95 on it. Originally used it as boot security, so that it would not boot without the 5 1/4 boot disk. I was offered borland C++ 2.0 on seven 5 1/4 disks from high school, because I wanted to learn the language (and because they were giving it away). About three months later, I bought my current machine in pieces and put it together. I decided to add the 5 1/4 drive because I had a spare space and power connector for it. And thats the story.

I like stories. I was just curious.

Now, about that harddrive, ARE YOU KIDDING!? A 500 GB drive that is nearly full and tried but failed to defrag since you got it?

It will *not* defrag. I just moved another 70gigs off it and it won't play the game. It's a raid drive on an old 133 PCI card. Dunno what the hell is wrong with it.

[blutach]

Blue is VERY good

Of course I am!

 

Regards

[Dolt]

Cool, I'll do that for the next version then.

 

I hadn't seen that 'SetEndOfFile' function before now but I knew this kinda of thing was possible because lots of programs seem to allocate the full size needed for a file before actually writing anything.

 

Perhaps I'll limit it to just doing it on NTFS though if there's a lot of overhead on FAT.

 

EDIT: Done it now. Thanks again.

 

I think WinRAR is one such program. Windows Explorer also uses it while copying or moving files.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Yeah that's actually the one I was referring to (without naming names).

[Dolt]

It actually told me defragging would be a good idea..... which I did. 90 minutes later and the drive looks the same now as it did before. I knew there was a reason I just don't bother anymore.

 

1. Your drive will defragment better IF it has more free space. The window defragmenter will not even do anything unless a drive has 20% free space.

 

2. Buy Perfect Disk 8.0, it's 100 times better than what you get from Microsoft.

 

P.S. - I do not work for them.

[Dolt]

I defrag my drives quite frequently (if I don't set a schedule to do it for me), but what I mean is that I don't take note of which files are fragmented and which aren't.

 

I do tend to do drive c: a lot more often than my other drives though and I never use c: for building / burning images.

 

So long as all the pretty little blocks are up one end of the drive I'm happy

 

I defragment anywhere for daily to every thre months depending in the partition.

In general I'd recommend you do it at least monthly and if you use a good program

like Perfect Disk you can do it weekly (since most data will already be optimized) on

drive partitions you use regularly.

 

I only defragment my ISO target partition more than weekly. I don't want to be

burning from a fragmented image file. Perfect Disk is especially nice at lining up

the blocks for contiguous sequential access and leaving an unfragmented space

at the end of the disk for new image files to be stored without them getting all

fragmented. Diskeeper is HORRIBLE at defragmenting free space.

[dbminter]

Ah, yes, those times when we dig through the junk and are amazed what we find. I still have that 8 inch floppy disk somewhere that I salvaged from someone else's junk and kept it as a souvenir. And the ancient board for an 8088 that added a parallel printer port to the device. And the wand barcode reader.

 

 

Reminds me that I one time possessed the ANCIENT version of the DexDrive for the Playstation, the one that wrote to 3.5 floppy disks! Hooked up directly to the Memory Card slot on the Playstation and required its own power supply. The floppies could only hold 3 saves! Sucker cost me $99!

[dbminter]

Buy Perfect Disk 8.0, it's 100 times better than what you get from Microsoft.

 

P.S. - I do not work for them.

 

 

Do I detect a hint of guilt here?

 

 

 

 

[Shamus_McFartfinger]

It actually told me defragging would be a good idea..... which I did. 90 minutes later and the drive looks the same now as it did before. I knew there was a reason I just don't bother anymore.

 

1. Your drive will defragment better IF it has more free space. The window defragmenter will not even do anything unless a drive has 20% free space.

 

2. Buy Perfect Disk 8.0, it's 100 times better than what you get from Microsoft.

 

P.S. - I do not work for them.

1. Good try but that ain't the problem. I freed up about 90gig on that drive before trying again without any success. The Windows defrag util just won't touch it.

 

2. Perhaps you're right. Still, it's not a drive I'm all that worried about as it's just used as a shared dumping ground for files before they're moved elsewhere or burned to disk. It has to be 3 years since I started using it and even being fragmented as badly as it is, it's still a very quick drive even though it's an old PCI 133 controller.

[dbminter]

My schedule is just now activating. Every 4 weeks, for a few days, 2 drives a day get defragged.

[f0dder]

Thanks for adding the option, looking forward to a new download!

 

And yeah, there's a lot of overhead on FAT - basically it seems to be as slow as if you manually wrote zeroes to the file until it had the target size, whereas on NTFS it's a few minor FS meta-info manipulations.

 

It's worth noting that, with the "old" method of writing files, you don't need a heavily fragmented filesystem just to get a pretty fragmented file, so it's nice to that you've added support for space reservation.

 

As for defraggers, Nuts & Bolts used to be great in the days of FAT and Win9x, and none of the NTFS defraggers are quite as good. PerfectDisk is the only one that seems to be much of a difference from the one that ships with 2k/XP.

[dbminter]

Ah, Nuts & Bolts! There's a blast from the past! I still have my Nuts & Bolts Platinum disc, somewhere. Bought, when was it? 1998? 2000? Next, I'll be reliving memories of QEMM, RamDoubler, and that infamous SoftRAM that tricked you into thinking it was working.

[blutach]

Is Diskeeper no good?

 

And I remember QEMM. I still can't figure out between extended and expanded memory though, db!

 

Regards

[f0dder]

Is Diskeeper no good?

 

It doesn't seem much different, performance-wise, to me than the defragger that ships with XP. It's got some better scheduling options etc, but that's about it. I haven't done any highly objective and quantifiable tests on this though, it's more of a "feeling" thing

[blutach]

K, thanks. Might give PerfectDisk a go.

 

Regards

[JasonFriday13]

@blu

 

Yes I was referring to you when I wrote that sentence .

 

Now, I took this screenshot of my Win98 partition being defragged on the weekend:

 

 

I don't think it was ever this fragmented! It's all blue again so no worries .

 

If you are wondering why my partitions are smaller now, its because I installed Linux on my machine. Check the chat section for my thread on linux.