Perfect Disk

[DigeratiPrime]

gah i meant Tarun, very sorry Jeremy

[RJARRRPCGP]

i cant belive u man....everytime when u have an issue on your pc u blame some software....

i read lots of your posts in nlite thread that in the end turn out is not nlite fault....

so now i can bet is not perfect disk errors ....

i recommand that u should the defragment utility from windows.

I don't blame everything on software.

I first off said that the Perfect Disk issue seems to be under Windows XP only. I dunno why.

I also thoroughly test my PC hardware. I put my PCs through boot camp! If Prime95 fails, they're DQ'ed!

I also checked the SMART. The SMART was fine.

Edited September 9, 2006 by RJARRRPCGP

[Andromeda43]

Ok, so let me see if I got the gist of this thread correctly..... (so far, it's been a bit vague)

PerfectDisk is crapola.....Diskkeeper is written by the same company that wrote Windows Defrag (a fact, not rumor) and they support the Church of Scientology. How am I doing so far?

Well, I'm so glad to know all that, but I quit using Defrag a long time ago to keep my HD in order.

All the defrag programs 'wet the bed' as far as this tech is concerned. The last decent Defrag was in Windows ME. I still share that will all my Win-98 customers.

I found that if I just do a Ghost Restore after I've done a Ghost backup, all my files are rewritten in perfect order, with no spaces and NO fragmentation. And it only takes five minutes, not the long times that defrag programs are noted for. When seen from MS XP's Defrag Analysis, right after a Restore, it looks like this:

Now, if any of yous have a Defrag program that can do any better'n that.....I'll buy it.

Cheers!

Andromeda43

[Jeremy]

You've posted that several times. PerfectDisk isn't crapola, either. Just because it wasn't written by the people who originated the API for defrag, doesn't mean it sucks. And who cares about Scientology...

I also don't consider restoring an image file every night or week a way to avoid fragmentation (consistent even). You're essentially doing a defrag by restoring and having your files re-written to the HD in perfect order with no gaps. I suppose the only beneficial thing is that restoring takes less time than defragmenting. However, is it more work for the HD to rewrite your entire partition, or just to defrag the files that already exist? Think about that... Time VS Workload

[CoffeeFiend]

Ok, so let me see if I got the gist of this thread correctly..... (so far, it's been a bit vague)

PerfectDisk is crapola.....Diskkeeper is written by the same company that wrote Windows Defrag (a fact, not rumor) and they support the Church of Scientology. How am I doing so far?

You got that backwards. PerfectDisk is great, while DK isn't exactly stellar (and yes, MS licensed an old version of that thing to make a even suckier version), and does support scientology.

As for your disk usage graphs, that doesn't mean a whole lot. Your drives could still be fragmented (not like the windows defragger is very smart) - and definitely not optimized (like with smart placement or such). I have yet to see a single partition NOT be fragmented after ghosting it (even if you've defragged before making the image). There has ALWAYS been fragments after restoring the image (except perhaps for FAT16/32 - which I haven't used in ages and truly don't care for).

Besides, there's no way you could reimage my PC in 5 minutes, and having such images for all my PCs would take a huge amount of storage for nothing.

And imaging your OS and restoring it does absolutely nothing to all my data partitions (which are ~95% of my storage). I'm not going to make a ghost image of the video server to defrag it.

[Jeremy]

Couldn't agree with you more, Crahak.

[ripken204]

Not a single problem, ever.

Software cannot damage your hardware. You probably had the errors on your hard drive and were unaware of them. I see it happen from time to time.

software can damage your hardware. what if i use an overclocking program to tell my cpu to go to a bazillion volts and 50000000ghz

[DigeratiPrime]

well personally i think defraging is overrated. I dont see how all the extra stress you're applying to the hdd is worth the minimal performance gain.

Like Andromeda43 I use imaging software for my root partition so i never care about how fragmented that gets. I restore it probably once everyweek or other week and it only takes about 2 minutes for the whole process. My other partitions have larger clusters sizes (16kb) so they fragment considerably slower anyway.

[Zxian]

well personally i think defraging is overrated. I dont see how all the extra stress you're applying to the hdd is worth the minimal performance gain.

It's extra stress if you run continuous large defragmentation passes like PerfectDisk seems to do. Keep things tidy and you won't need to run things for long periods of time.

And with 16kb clusters, you end up wasting more space for those small files...

[Maleko]

I'll share my first problem i had this weekend actually with my comp and perfect disk.

Computer running normal, one night it auto restarts for its scheduled defrag of offline files. Thats fine.

Turn my monitor on in the morning to find a nice error message just b4 the windows logon box should appear, entitles winlogon.exe, with the description of:

the file odbc32.dll is not a valid windows image file, try reinstalling blar blar blar,

and same error with sfc_os.dll.

Now, i don't know why the hell that happened, but I couldnt logon, replacing files didnt work, nothing.

Just a bit of coinsidence it happens right after Perfect Disk.

Although, it hasnt put me of perfect disk, cause i, like many, have tried other defrags, and I favor this one.

Dunno why it happened, but it ment i could give my comp a nice fresh install anyway!

[RogueSpear]

well personally i think defraging is overrated. I dont see how all the extra stress you're applying to the hdd is worth the minimal performance gain.

With a fairly recent computer, yea it may be overrated somewhat. But with older computers it makes a world of difference. And there's even a world of difference between what Windows Defrag and PerfectDisk will do when it comes to those same machines.

In addition to some of the older machines I have at work, I've also done some volunteer IT work for charities and non-profits. An older computer, say a P3-500 with 512MB, is still a perfectly viable Windows XP computer, but it could obviously use all the help it can get. These slower machines also happen to benefit the most from a proper defrag.

[Jeremy]

Older machines also take longer to defrag on smaller HDs.

[jftuga]

For those people who claim that defragging is either overrated or unnecessary, I beg to differ. Look at this picture. This is where our SQL database lives. Our performance sucks. We will be purcashing PD 8 real soon and then I will repost a new picture and about performance gains.

http://www.fcs.uga.edu/~john/VolumeD.jpg

-John

Edited September 12, 2006 by jftuga

[CoffeeFiend]

For those people who claim that defragging is either overrated or unnecessary, I beg to differ. Look at this picture. This is where our SQL database lives. Our performance sucks. We will be purcashing PD 8 real soon and then I will repost a new picture and about performance gains.

http://www.fcs.uga.edu/~john/VolumeD.jpg

-John

I can attest to that. I've got several DBs (main one being SQL Server 2005 and others used mainly for testing/porting apps), and it does get heavily fragmented indeed, especially when you run all kinds of tests (with scripts to generate data, test apps, empty database, refill it, etc - stuff we do extensively when developping/testing apps). Add a couple SCMs (vsts/svn/cvs/whatever) to that (where tons of small files are very frequently modified/added/deleted) and you've got a huge mess (not counting other shares, virtual machines or anything else either)

[dcyphure]

i know with diskeeper, if i used mft optimize with 64kb cluster size..it would totally screw up the os forcing me to reinstall

i liked perfect disk, but have no use for any kind of defragger now though