why no updates to Defraggler in a year?

[Melchior]

1 minute ago, Augeas said:

I have to beg to differ with parts of this.... the third line actually... the first half...

Wear levelling is not seen by the operating system, NTFS, or any defragging software. NTFS, or FAT, allocates a cluster number to a file which remains unchanged for the life of the file, unless some user/client action (such as a defrag) occurs. Defraggers get their fragmentation information from the MFT, not from the disk, i.e. how many datarun entries there are in the MFT record for a file. What physical pages on an SSD are actually allocated is anyone's guess.

interesting.

 

[nukecad]

Agreed, intetesting.

Guess I need to look again at wear levelling. (or maybe at where defragmenters get their information from, which of course may/will be different for different defragmenters).

Although, as I said in a different thread. I've come to the opinion that defragmenting of any drive is not realy needed (and hasn't been for a couple of decades).

If you didn't have a defragmenter showing you a drive map you would never notice any difference in performance - which is one reason why the built in Windows tool no longer shows you a drive map.

[Augeas]

Wear levelling is entirely within  the SSD and under the control of the aptly named SSD controller. If you can see what's in the Flash Translation Layer you're probably in a research lab.

If a defragger looked at a disk, looking only at allocated clusters as defined in the cluster bit map, it would just see endless clusters of meaningless data. Where does a file start, and end, and are those thousand clusters in a row all one file, or file fragments, or what? There's no way to know. So defraggers look at the MFT (ignoring FAT for the moment). On;y there is the connection between file and data clusters, and only there are file fragments defined and located.

[Himeko]

Fragmentation does not (can't) happen with SSDs in the way HDDs do, if anything it shortens its lifespan when used, you should only TRIM SSDs (Windows does this automatically or you can check under disk options/tools/optimize).

Not too sure what "SSD optimizer" apps do exactly, like Auslogics', but I guess they just trigger the TRIM command.

[Augeas]

Fragmentation on an SSD happens exactly the same as it does on an HDD. Fragmentation is a file with its data spread across multiple and separate groups of clusters, or pages, and it's the file system that determines that. It happens in the same way whether the storage device is an HDD or an SSD, although the consequences may be different.

[Melchior]

Piriform, you say you have updated Defraggler for business..?!
why no updates for general release?
please don't abandon your customers I paid once for Defraggler a long time ago..

there is no point to pay for it since you have made no updates in years... :(

[Melchior]

bumping my thread.

still no updates to Defraggler released to the general public..

I am so sad.

 

[HSchulze]

5th year, and large hard drive users like myself would like some improvements.  I would buy the Biz version if your website showed that it had more features. Performance is important for video editing, dropping to 20% on a fragmented drive.  I already use SSD pairs to bounce edits, but on a productive day, I can generate / replace 1TB or more of files.  Making the drives larger just exacerbates the problem (ie RAID of 2-5 drives, striping, etc), increases the peak speed but does not decrease the defrag time.

1) Please allow processing more than one drive at a time. Exists in competitive software.

2) Proper multi-thread support to process the file/fragment sorting operations in parallel. 

3) Increase the allowed amount of files being read/written so that scatter-gather can increase the throughput.  On 32GB machine, only 300MB used (apparently).  I see some defrag software do long read/write operations under some circumstances, much faster than reading and writing single small files.

4) Decide whether moving the next 50,000 semi-consecutive files one at a time is slower than reading them all at once, and writing them in a consolidated block is faster.  Making use of the hard drive's internal DRAM for read-ahead makes sense to speed up the software.  I know it would be fast, because on an SSD you can move 500MB/sec or more.

At >3 days per drive (70% used 12TB, not even the latest 24TB) capable of 220MB/s, it takes 10 hours to copy the drive to an empty one, and 10 hours to copy it back.  Need to do this type of defrag once a month or so.  Consolidation (full or fragmented) is important because writing new files scatters into all the potholes.  It shouldn't take an hour to do a fast consolidation.

I would put $100 on the table for 2 or more of the above.

[menthor]

2 years after no updates someone from piriform said "quite the contrary of abandoned" - in reality 6 years later still no updates so it's obviously abandoned

[Melchior]

11 minutes ago, menthor said:

2 years after no updates someone from piriform said "quite the contrary of abandoned" - in reality 6 years later still no updates so it's obviously abandoned

yup.. its sad because I still use Defraggler every day...

and I don't know of any other good defragging tools I can use.. lol

as good as defraggler..

[HSchulze]

Glary utilities is much faster, but not as accurate nor flexible. I end up using 3 tools to scrub system drive and 3 tools to fix massively fragmented drives after astrophotography explosion of multiple files per frame of a 100Mpixel camera.  Both 2TB M.2 and 12TB HDD are needed for scratch files.

Glary defrag gets 10k files scrunched in less than 5 mins.  Then Defraggler for the 50 remaining massive OS and protected files, then a reboot defrag for the MFT etc.

When done working, I move the files to a 3rd drive and a NAS for backup, delete the temp files and start over.

It's 20 hours of intensive disk work of terabytes of temp files.

[Melchior]

4 hours ago, HSchulze said:

Glary utilities is much faster, but not as accurate nor flexible.

In that case I will stick with Defraggler then... lol

but thx anyway.

[Andavari]

Allot of defrag tools are now several years old at this point. Be happy that it still works in modern OSes, and in particular if it doesn't crash. The crashing is why I don't bother with Defraggler at all, although I do have it archived on several external backup disks.

Perhaps the lack of updates in many defrag tools has something to do with the adoption of SSDs, and their price drop over the years.

[nukecad]

2 hours ago, Andavari said:

Allot of defrag tools are now several years old at this point......

Perhaps the lack of updates in many defrag tools has something to do with the adoption of SSDs

I think that it's more to do with the fact that defragging is defragging - so what is there to be updated?

When something already works as well as it can then there is nothing to be fixed or 'made better'.

Unless the technology of spinning drives has a startling new innovation, or someone comes up with a magic way to do defrags differently, then all that is left for any 'update' is to mess about with the user interface.
(And then many will shout 'I don't like this new look, can we have the old familiar look back?').

[HSchulze]

The problem is the size of files and HDDs are increasing so poorly threaded software using 1 or 2 of 16 or more cores and getting 20MB/s on a 220MB/s drive is inefficient and slow.  It's almost faster to copy the remaining files from one HDD to an empty one.  If I had RAID10 it wouldn't go much faster, but take 5x longer.  Background defragmentation starts to make sense.

[Andavari]

On 06/02/2024 at 04:52, nukecad said:

When something already works as well as it can then there is nothing to be fixed or 'made better'.

Unless the technology of spinning drives has a startling new innovation

HDD technology will of course continue, and that's why defrag software also needs to keep up with advances instead of having some old versions that don't properly work or just barely work with modern HDDs.

Some defrag tools take too long to just Analyse an HDD, let alone defragment one sometimes with rather outdated algorithms in my opinion such as; "why is it even bothering to move that" and "why isn't it moving that at all" comes to mind.

Something a few years old at this point in papers is the use of Zoning in HDDs, and some can take advantage of a TRIM command. Then there's also the supposed upcoming speed increase that will get some of them near enough to SATA 6gbps SSD speeds (probably only sequentially).

But then comes the noise levels, I look at my Disk Network set top box and think it makes so much noise and it's because of the HDD inside it constantly making allot of clatter.

[markem]

There are a large number of defragmenting programs available. Many are for free.

I have Perfect Disk v14 installed. I have found a problem with the software. There are times when a space fits a file perfectly. But PD moves the file out to the end of the hard drive, optimizes it, and then moves it back again. Over and over and over until I stop PD from defragmenting the hard drive. Raxco so far has not responded to any of my support tickets. (I have two.).

Defraggler is my go to program when PD starts to act up. It just works. I have twelve 4 TB hard drives (HDDs). I do not use SSDs because years ago I did have an SSD hard drive. One day, a thunderstorm came through, ZAP!, no more SSD. Lost all of my work. So now I have all of these HDDs in external hard drive cases which (so far) have never failed. The main hard drive is also an HDD and also has 4TB of space on it.

However, now I am looking at the new 1TB SD cards. I had gotten one of them a couple of years ago but when I tried to put files onto the card - it suddenly became corrupted. So I went "I'll give it a couple of years so they can iron out these kinds of problems". Now 1TB SD cards are down to $68. (Of course there are the El Cheapo ones for $20 which really are just 8GB or maybe 64GB SD cards with mucked up software that says they are a 1TB SD card. Don't buy them. But SanDisk and PNY and Lexar now have 1TB SD cards for around $90 each. So I am thinking I may start buying them and transfer everything over to SD cards.

Did you know that you can buy holders for SD cards that are like the USB Hubs you can buy? Yeah. So now you can have eight or ten or more SD cards plugged into it and use it like regular disk drives.

Anyway, I have something like ten different defragmentation programs which I have downloaded and tried. But so far Defraggler is still the best out there.

[Andavari]

The problem you had years ago with SSDs is understandable and is documented online with some SSD controllers having serious issues, etc., or drives wiping themselves clean leaving nothing on themselves for no apparent reason. More modern name brand SSDs (avoid no-name/no-brand drives) from 2018 to current are much better than SSDs released for example 10 years ago when they were overly expensive and some having serious issues.

SD Cards just like USB Flash Drives are unreliable, slow, and very easy to loose slow SSDs that don't feature TRIM to help speed them up after so many writes start to make them unbearably slow! SSDs with a DRAM Cache are going to be way more reliable.

SD Cards and USB Flash Drives are alright for temporarily storing files and then moving files around from one system to another, but nowhere near as reliable as HDD for archiving purposes. But as always multiple copies of each disk/drive are going to be required in case one fails.

The first HDD I've ever had fail was running nearly non-stop for 13 years 2 months, just happened January 2024.