system volume information files

[DANSY]

dell xps 720, vista ultimate 32 bit, two raptor 150 GB HD in raid 1/striping configuration. After cleaning up my system (registry cleaner, junk files etc) I end up with several very large "System volume information" files ranging from 3 GB/2 fragments to 15 GB/22 fragments and summary of 4 fragmented files totalling 29.4 GB and 41 total fragments, 16% fragmentation. (Obviously using defraggler). This is after several runs. Occasionally I actually got to 0% fagmentation but I can't determine what I did different. My questions are: Should I expect to get better than this? ( recommendations are typically less than 5% and on my old XP single HD cpu I typically get 2 t0 3 %); Is there something special about system volume information files that I am unaware of?; Is there something about a raid 1 configuration that is causing this lack of better performance?

 

Thanks in advance for any help or information on this subject.

DANSY

[Andavari]

Supposedly from information available on the web the System Volume Information bloat can happen using many defrag tools. It's not really recommended, however the way around it is to temporarily disable System Restore.

[Augeas]

There doesn't seem much point in defragging sys restore points. You will never read then in normal life, if you're doing a sys restore then a few milliseonds access wait won't be your greatest problem, and they are deleted and created on a rolling basis, so you'll be forever chasing your own tail.

[Andavari]

they are deleted and created on a rolling basis, so you'll be forever chasing your own tail.

That is very true, which is why I never turn off System Restore to "aid" in defragmenting as it seems rather pointless. Although I can understand the shock someone can get when they notice a huge amount of disk space being used from simply defragmenting with various defrag tools available.

[DANSY]

Thank you both, Andavari and Augeas for your helpful comments> I understand the issue better now and since my main concern is disc access speed and it would appear to me that since I hardly ever need to use my system restore feature, these files are not hurting my performance. THis closes out my issue satisfactorily.

Best regards,

DANSY