[Defrag of Virtual PC & VirtualBox systems]

I tried Defraggler on a Sun VirtualBox with Windows 2003 server running in it. It was the only defrag tool that seems to work. Anyone else have any results to report?

TurtleWax

[Defragging Flash Drives]

I agree. There is absolutely no benefit to defrag a flash drive. I did find one really cool use for defraggler though! It works great for defragging a virtual PC/VirtualBox image! No other defrag tool seems to work very well in a virtual environment. Defraggler is the only one that I have tested that can successfully defrag them. Must be the way it accesses the 'disk'.

TurtleWax

 

The situation is far more complex.

 

There is no advantage to routine defrag as in something that runs in background like Vista's automatic defrag.

 

However, SSDs do need "conditioning" as it fills up and there are fewer and fewer cells to use for wear leveling / scattering.

 

I have used defrag (including defagger) to do a form of wear leveling that exposes new cells to use.

 

Use of this occasionally (once a month, every few weeks) have resulted in performance improvements, but not due to defrag per se, but due to more efficient use of the wear leveling system.

 

There is not a real good commercial tool available right now that does what we might call good SSD conditioning.

 

I am bugging these guys to come up with one.

 

For more info on this, visit with me on d111 at OCZ SSD Forum.... a place where you will find a wealth of info on tweaking SSDs to perfection.

[Defraggler 1.05 apparently looping round huge list of files]

The noise on your external hard drive may be indication of a BAD sector on the hard drive. Try running a full checkdisk/scandisk on it including testing unused space to mark the bad sector.

 

Note to others: If it is not a external Hard drive, it is not recommended to defrag. USB thumb drives usually use a method to reduce the number of times each memory location is written to increase the life of the thumb drive due to limited number of writes before the drive fails. Defragging a usb key should be done sparingly at most.

 

Sincerely,

TurtleWax

 

Little of what I did may be relevant, but this is the sequence.

 

I've used Defraggle 1.04 build 098 (GUI version) on two computers, on four drives, over the last couple of weeks. Very pleasing.

 

I then installed 1.05 build 111 on both PCs today, and have defragged one drive on each PC successfully.

 

On my external drive I then tried the command-line version of 1.05 (DF E:), and it gave all the expected messages up to the "Defragging 90% complete", and just stuck there. CPU usage was nearly 50% (i.e. 100% of one core), and the I/O Read and Write bytes were static. There was a continuous chuff-chuff-chuff noise from the hard disk (head movement) about twice a second, but nothing else happened for well over an hour, at which point I cancelled the Command Prompt window.

 

I then ran the GUI version of 1.05 with /debug, and this again stopped at 90%, with an enormous list of files being displayed one at a time below the "Current State; total fragments 0" line. The debug log is over 2 MB so far after an hour, and there is a set of lines for each file culminating in the final part of the message line "The destination block is not free" (new file name, next block number in sequence from the previous).

 

After another hour or so I will probably get bored and cancel the execution of Defraggler, and then run a CHKDSK on the drive. There doesn't seem much point posting 2MB of mostly repetitive log, but if a Mod would send me a PM I could attach it to a reply (I hope!).

 

Any ideas what else I should do?

 

Thanks!