Defraggler 2.02 slow on one drive, good otherwise

Defraggler
1

I have encountered a rather strange issue.

Defraggler 2.02.253 is slow on one drive (only), good otherwise on other drives.

I have several drives on my Windows XP Pro SP3 system:

two internal: Seagate 160GB main, Samsung 60GB data;

two external USB: Seagate 640GB Freeagent, LaCie 1TB Quadra with Samsung HD103SI drive.

All are NTFS format, and are "Basic" and "Healthy" in Windows Computer Mgmt/Disk Mgmt.

And all are decent/good in the SMART reports from either HDDHealth or CrystalDiskInfo.

On the first three drives Defraggler works well and seems relatively zippy - on both the two internals and the Seagate USB external.

That is, to defragment a "[folder]" directory takes usually less than a second, to defrag a file of 50-100MB or so, takes a few seconds.

But on the LaCie External, (USB2 connection, Samsung mechanism), it takes a very long time for Defraggler. About 10-15 seconds per [folder] directory defrag, and perhaps 20 to 40 seconds for a single file that is in the 20-200 MB range.

The LaCie Samsung drive is 1 TB capacity, 27% used, thus 73% (685GB) free, I have run Windows Chkdsk/scandisk/Tools-error-checking on the drive regularly. Even ran the Defraggler error check with good report: "Verify complete. No major problems were detected."

And, other defraggers seem to operate at normal speed on it -- MyDefrag, AuslogicDefrag. It is just that Defraggler runs slowly on it.

Compression and Indexing and Quotas are Disabled on the LaCie, so no slowness from those.

Note that file transfers, reads, writes seem to operate at expected speeds on the LaCie. That is, using Teracopy (or Windows) I get same or better speeds than on my external Seagate 640. So the drive spinning and data transfer seem OK. It is just Defraggler which is so very sloooooooooow on that drive.

Any thoughts on why that might be so? :blink:

Thx.

2

hi,

i've had issues with a 1Tb partition as can be seen below - not sure if you've tried different cluster sizes, etc

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=31686

3

Hi john, thanks for the reply.

When I got the LaCie external 1TB, I used either the LaCie Setup Assistant or Windows to format to standard NTFS. The drive requires either one or the other before first use.

In any event, it is using standard Windows NTFS parameters of 4K sectors.

And I compared the values to my external Seagate FreeAgent and both seem the same (listed below).

So at this point, it seems to be physical volume size of 1TB, or else Defraggler does not like the Samsung branded disk, but I think that is not likely relevant.

I have one other LaCie Quadra, but it is formatted to HFS+ for my Mac, and so would not be good to have Defraggler try to optimize it, as I think that Defraggler probably does not know about the Macintosh way of using two physical file 'forks' for each logical file (the standard format for Mac OS Extended/HFS+ hard drives).

Details on formats of my two primary external HDs.

Though, as I noted, my file copy speeds, as reported to me by TeraCopy show that the LaCie copies files slightly faster than the Seagate. EG: file writes to Lacie at 17-22 MBps over USB, and file writes to Seagate at 15-20 MBps over USB. on average.

While the Seagate Defragglering is fast, and the Lacie Defragglering slow.

So cannot fault the drive transfer speed as culprit in slow Defraggler defragmenting.

---info as reported by Easus Partition Master 5.5.1---

LaCie Quadra 1TB NTFS - Samsung HD103SI 1000.2GB

1 volume partition

Total Physical sectors 953867.2 MB / 931.51 GB

Bytes per sector 512

Bytes per cluster 4096 (4K) this is the NTFS default

First MFT Cluster 786432

File Record size 1024

NTFS Version 3.01

262 GB Used, 669 GB Unused

------------------

FreeAgent 640 NTFS - Seagate ST3640323AS 640.1 GB

1 volume partition

Total Physical sectors 610477.8 MB / 596.17 GB

Bytes per sector 512

Bytes per cluster 4096 (4K) this is the NTFS default

First MFT Cluster 786432

File Record size 1024

NTFS Version 3.01

487 GB Used, 108 GB Unused

--------------------------------------------

4

It is just Defraggler which is so very sloooooooooow on that drive.

Any thoughts on why that might be so? :blink:

Thx.

Can you update to the 2.03 version & see if the issue still exists?

5

Can you update to the 2.03 version & see if the issue still exists?

Hi,

I have updated to Defraggler 2.03.282.

It does now seem to be marginally faster, but it is still slower when running on my external USB2 Lacie Quadra Samsung 1TB than it is when defragging my external USB2 Seagate Freeagent 640GB.

(Note if it was not clear before, these are both 3.5" full size, 7200 rpm drives in wall-powered external cases using certified USB2 'HighSpeed' cables to plug into the mobo USB ports on the back of my Sony Vaio minitower.)

Some improvement.

But still noticeably slower than my other external drive.

I will try to get some time to plug in and test my portable (2.5") drives and see if there is any variability there. Though, none of them are larger than 500 GB capacity, so I am not expecting to notice anything other than fact that 2.5" 5400 rpm portable drives will probably be slower than my full size drives.

Thanks.

P.S. What I have now gotten into the habit of doing is to only defrag the items I consider 'high importance'. That is, the "[folder]" directory entries, so that windows can find and access files fast, and to defrag the files that I access most frequently, and the most used program and program support files. I am thinking that it is less important to defrag every little file that I might only look at once a month. As long as there is lots of GB of free space, that is...