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Allow concurrent defrags


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I find it strange that I cannot defragment multiple drives at the same time. I have 4 physically distinct drives, and a system vastly more than capable enough of handling any overhead that Defraggler will dish out. Why must I defragment my drives serially?

 

Please consider making it possible to defragment in parallel, even if it not the default, and even if it requires a manual registry/INI hack.

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In my experience Windows is NOT a proper multitasking operating system - there are race hazards and things go belly-up.

 

I have had a 600 GB GPT Disk with 500 GB of files converted into an MBR Disk full of RAW DATA and Unallocated Space because SATA Drive number allocation is a matter of luck.

I have sent pairs of messages to a file which normally captures both, but had a 1 % chance of capturing only one or even neither.

 

I guess it MIGHT be possible for Windows API's to multitask and simultaneously defrag multiple drives,

but a 1% chance of something going wrong would not suit me.

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seems some of the current crop of defragers out there allow simultaneous defrags (o&o and even Windows Disk Defragmenter).

 

personally I've always wanted to 'watch' each PC maintenance task and check how it went before doing the next one.

but if I did want this feature and considering the time it would take, I'd setup a batch job to do it all then shutdown the PC as the last task of the day.

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There is no additional risk in simultaneous defrags. As mta mentions, other defraggers do it, including the native one. I know inexplicable and bad things happen, but I've run simultaneous-defrag-capable software for years with no problems... Until upgrading to Windows 8.

 

I can only assume that the reason Defraggler doesn't do it is because they don't want multiple partitions on the same physical disk being defragged simultaneously, but then again, if this was the case, they could easily prevent that from happening. I see no reason not to allow simultaneious defrags of drives on different physical drives.

 

I have two separate 4-TB disks that are each ~1/2 full, and I've never used a third-party defragger on them. As it turns out, the native defragger totally sucks, and it's taking eons for the first one to finish. It's aggravatingly stupid that I have to wait for it to finish before I start defragging a totally separate disk.

 

No, Defraggler does not allow multiple instances of itself to be run, so that's no workaround (without sandboxing or some other nuttery that I'm not going to engage in).

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I guess it MIGHT be possible for Windows API's to multitask and simultaneously defrag multiple drives,

 

This can be achieved very easily. Creating a new instance of a Windows API and running it somewhat isolated to other instances can be achieved with about four lines of code in any decent language. (See also: Encapsulation.)

 

doesn't do it is because they don't want multiple partitions on the same physical disk being defragged simultaneously

 

I think you've hit the nail on the head right there. With a bit of engineering effort, this could be overcome (as you said); but it's the kind of thing that takes time to develop. You could get it working quite easily by querying WMI for all the physical drives, then match up all the partitions to drives and lock concurrent defragging for drives that share a physical disk.

 

You only have to look to Piriform's Speccy to see how hit-and-miss querying WMI can be. There's a whole forum here demonstrating that WMI sometimes returns incorrect information. In the context of Speccy, the wrong information is a minor annoyance. If you were concurrently defragmenting drives based on the aforementioned misinformation, it would be a disaster.

I'm Shane.

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