The best optimization is simple but no-one uses it :(

[Leolo]

Hi people,

 

Nowadays most people have really big hard drives (320 GiB and even greater sizes!), so the fast area at the beggining of the disk is quite ample.

 

How come nobody does the most simple and logical optimization possible, which would be perfectly good for the vast majority of the users?

 

I mean, just put the PAGEFILE first, then the %WINDIR% folder, the %PROGRAMFILES% folder next, and leave all the rest of the files afterwards.

 

It's a no brainer, but by some strange reason I fail to understand, nobody in this world does just that. Why, oh why????

[redhawk]

Most hard drive are so fast (and buffer data before sending this to the host) that you really wouldn't see any difference from an optimised file system to one that's slightly fragmented.

Furthermore performance drops are really only relevant at the very end of the hard drive not 1/2 way or 3/4 way (HD Tune benchmark testing should be able to prove this fact).

 

There are a few programs that do perform OS file optimisation however I have not see any noticeable improvements, something like 1 second faster boot up time from cold start to my Windows XP desktop.

File fragmentation is something that happens and is unavoidable because when files expand and find their next clusters are already taken they have to go look elsewhere.

Most files can be moved however pagefile.sys is a little harder since it's exclusively locked by the operating system.

Even if you could move pagefile.sys to the start of the disk the fact that is expandable in size could cause nearby files that are also expanding to prematurely fragment.

 

As long as you defrag your file system once a month then that's really all you need.

 

Richard S.

[Rob Defraggle]

I wouldn't want to do what the OP suggests for a number of reasons :

 

1) I bought a good amount of memory in my PC, most of it is used by Win 7 to cache disk blocks, and the pages can be released and re-read from disk when necessary, so there is little paging. Win 7 does not perform worse than Linux which does very little writing & reading to/from pagefile in my useage, if Win 7 did it would crawl. I suspect this "No brainer" optimistation could slow a system down! I moved my pagefile out of C: drive, into a freed partiton and saw no difference (despite it being at beginning of disk).

 

2) I installed into a sane C: partition size so all of Windows and most common small applications have locality and a highish transfer rate. I can store most of the big rarely used crapola in another partition entirely. It is not as convenient as under Linux or UNIX but it is doable.

 

3) Demand paging and access to small files & folders, means Random Access speed is more important than sequential transfer rate. There's OS features to do pre-fetching and benefit from sequential reads, so it's actually those files which would most logically be placed on fastest part of disk, but that requires M$'s cooperation in the OS, to allocte them or move them (good luck with that!). If you want performance, buy a good SSD!

 

4) After regular updates, imposing the ordering on windows and program files would cause lots of recompacting.

 

All in all, I really doubt you'll see a large performance boost, it is easy to compare; you can install into multiple partitions and have most program files in a different drive, with user data mounted elsewhere. I have most software on a 2nd disk, rather than on the system drive, which actually really does improve performance.

 

Provision of scientifically benchmarked numbers could change my mind.