idle curiousity: defragmenting

[jeana]

Why is the Norton Disk Doctor defrag utility so much faster than the built-in Windows defragmenter? Are the results any different?

[OuTpaTienT]

I can't imagine the results are much different, considering the Windoze built-in defragger is also a product of Norton (just an older version that MS purchased the rights to).

[johnpaul]

You're right about Norton being faster. And it puts the swap file up front, too.

JP

[pickel]

'Speed Disk' is even faster than Disk Doctor. Every time I screw up, I run it and
System Check and Win Doctor as well as System File Checker to put all back right. Usual do a reg/restore for safe measure, too. Setting swap file double your RAM helps too!!

the pickel

[akaBruno]

I've had to run the Windows defragger in Safe Mode so that I could boot. Then had to run Norton Speed Disc because of everything that Windows missed.

[krusty the klown]

What version of windoze are you running??

I noticed that win95 defragger wasn't that slow, but when I changed to 98, defrag took hours (literally). If you are running 98 defrag, have a look in the options / settings and you should find an option to 'reorganise the disk so programs start faster' (something similar, anyway!!). I think you'll find that if you disable this option, 98 defrag will run a lot faster, because it will be like the old 95 defrag.

[Brydon]

I am sure that a fat16 drive in win95 is faster to defrag than a fat32 one in win98. Isn't it to do with the cluster size that makes it slower.

[Hellmund]

A fat16 is for drives less than 1gig.Fat32 only speeds up over 2gig.So obviously a smaller drive is going to take considerably less time.My 546m drives defragments a hell of a lot faster than my bro's 6.4gig.And yes it is to do with cluster size.IF you want more specific info here it is
Partition size fat16 fat32
32mb 2kb -
128mb 2kb -
256mb 4kb -
512mb 8kb 4kb
1gb 16kb 4kb
2gb 32kb 4kb
3gb-7gb - 4kb
8gb-16gb - 8kb
16gb-32gb - 16kb
>32gb - 32kb
copyright Microsoft(manual pg80)
Hope it helps
Hellmund

[krusty the klown]

Yeah, sure - cluster size will make a difference in the defrag time: a disk with lots of small clusters will be efficient in terms of storage, but slow to defrag compared to the same size disk with large clusters. My exeriences with the W95 vs 98 defrag were valid, as I was running W95 SR2, which supports FAT32 and when I installed 98, I used the same disk, partition size, cluster size, etc.

I'm sure you'll find that the default 're-arrange programs so that they start faster' option in 98's defragger really slows the process down.....?