Schedule & Manual de-frag optimize?

[fmummey]

:?: Because there is no Help menu, it occured to me if the only time it will

Optmize my hard drive is on a Schudule run or is it automatic on both?

[mikesw]

I've experimented with the two different defrag techniques that

IOBIT does vs. Windows defrag.

 

a). just doing defrag will just defrag the files. Windows defrag does

the same, but does a little bit more - see item (b)

 

b). IOBIT "defrag and optimize" vs windows defrag will not only defrag

the files, but will compact them. That is instead of having files

scattered around the disk once defragging is done, it will move all the files

to the front (outer edge) of the disk and fill as much of the empty space

as possible as it works its way towards the center. However, it may take

one more pass [or more] to maximize the compaction for IOBIT than

what windows can do. After I ran IOBIT "defrag and optimize" after two times,

I then ran "analyze" for windows defrag to let it tell me what it thought.

Thus, windows "defrag" and IOBIT "defrag and optimize" gave the

exact similar results. Doing a third run or more didn't change the results;

however, this could change based on ones particular situation. In my case,

there were at least 2 files of about 2 gigs to defrag, thus large files may take

multiple passes to optimize vs. smaller file sizes.

 

c). when IOBIT defrag runs automatically, it always starts runing on-the-hour and at no

other time unless you use the scheduler feature of the tool. Thus every hour, it tries to start

and looks at the cpu load number vs. what threshold you've set and determines whether to run

or not. As far as I can tell there is no delayed start should the load drop a few minutes after the hour,

but it will check again at the next hour interval again to start defragging. If the the defrag starts

and the load increases, it will pause until the load drops even if it is within the hour interval before

the next hour interval. It'd be better if they used the a moving average CPU load so that one increases

the chances that it will defrag more often.

[D Vibe]

Hello! I'm a new user of this program.

 

I'm not really sure how to interpret mikes list; but if I understood you correct you need to defrag two times to get it done efficient? I tried to defrag one time, but when I analyzed the drive it was still very fragged..

 

Is this actually normal? I'm defragging (plus optimizing) the drive at the moment right now, so I'll see what happens.. :)

[mikesw]

when just doing a defrag, it seems to take only one time to defrag

the disk vs. multiple times. However, this could be different should

the disk be serverly fragmented.

 

When doing the defrag+optimize, it may take more than one time

for large fragmented files, since it is not only defragging it, but it is

trying to move(meaning compact) the file (in this case a large file) to the

beginning of the disk at the location that has the largest free data block

available. Thus if it finds a data block that is large enough to lets say

handle a 2 GIG file in contiguous sequence, it will move it there even

though it may not be fully defragged. By doing this it will not split the

file up into pieces and scatter it around the disk with the preference

that it finds an available data block starting at the beginning of the disk

that is lets say 100K bytes, then find the next available one that may

be 1 Meg bytes, and keep breaking the file into pieces depending on

each data block size available until all 2 GIGs are done. If this is done,

then the disk head would have to jump from one data block to another

to retrieve all of these 2 Gigs. Thus, it's better to minimize head movement

by having one big data block of 2 GIGs such the HDD can start at one

location and continuously read the data out without moving around.

As a result of this big partially defragged file being moved to the largest

data block available on the disk, it seems that one has to make another pass

(or more) to then defrag this file while during this time the defragger

software may try to move it to another big large data block somewhere else on the disk.

 

The above paragraph, is a summary of what I've noticed as I defragged

my disk that contained large gigabyte files.

 

Thus, I'd suggest that one experiment and see what may be happening

in their situations since ones mileage may vary depending on disk drive

capacity size and file size.