A New Hard Drive, Free! - Defragmenting in WindowsNT

When your computer informs you that your disk has 4 gigabytes of free space, that space may be available as one contiguous chunk, or as a collection of thousands of random chunks of various size. Let's assume you now want to store a 3 gig video file. Your computer looks over the drive, totals up the available space, and starts to fill all the separate empty holes on your drive with the 3 gigabytes of data that comprise your video file. A running account of where each chunk of data resides is kept in a special "header file" that allows the computer to quickly find each chunk in its correct order when the file is retrieved.

Every time you erase and rewrite new data to your hard drive, the statistical probability that your data is being divided into smaller and smaller chunks increases. Obviously, it takes more time to retrieve a file that is separated all over a hard drive than to retrieve a file that resides in one, contiguous space. If you've used your hard drive for a long time with frequent writes, deletes and rewrites, you can be pretty sure it is heavily "fragmented." This means that your files are stored as small fragments in a random, jumbled order, all over your disk.

Writing to a fragmented disk is slow, because your computer has to examine the size of the file you are saving, find chunks of empty space, store the chunk, write a message to the header file, and repeat the process all over again until the file is stored.

In addition to losses in speed, a fragmented drive also wastes enormous amounts of space, which remain empty. This is because your computer is writing to the drive in chunks that are larger than some of the chunks which are empty and available on your drive. Let's say your computer writes in chunks that are 32 bytes minimum size, something like a cinder block when building a wall. If your computer has a space available that is 16 bytes wide, like the hold for a brick, the cinder block 32 byte chunk will not fit, so the 16 byte hole is ignored. Fragmented drives can have so many of these holes that as much as 20% of the drive can be left unused - wasted - when the drive appears to be full! On a five gig drive, this can amount to a full gig of wasted space.

The solution to fragmented drives is simple: Defragment your drive.

Defragmenting (or defragging) is an easy procedure that can be done in DOS or Windows 95, but for due to some (repetitive) fault of Microsoft, defragging cannot be done in WindowsNT 3X or 4X. We came across this problem when the two drives in our NLE that hold the programs and audio files, respectively, became so slow, they wouldn't allow proper functioning of the edit system. We looked in the Administrative Tools, nothing. We tried Symantec to ask about using Norton Utilities, nothing! No way to defragment the drives, except...Diskeeper from Executive Software.

Install this low cost ($PRICE) program and you have a defragmenter that will show you how badly your disk is jumbled and give you fast, easy, one-click solutions. Defragmenter will even work on networks and can be set up to run automatically in the background, defragmenting your disks even as they are being accessed by network clients!

Installation from the CD-ROM is fast and simple with no conflicts or crashes experienced on any of our machines (which includes an Integeraph TD400; an Intergraph TDZ425 with an nStore RAID array, TARGA 2000 DTX and Avid MCXpress, a DEC Alpha 466 with DPS Perception, a Compaq Deskstation 6000 and a clone dual Pentium 200 with DPS Perception). On each of these machines, significant fragmentation was found, even on the Compaq, which had been in service for only three months.

Diskeeper displays a simple graphic screen that produces an image of each hard drive on the system. Simply click on the hard drive for a quick analysis of the status. The program then offers a choice menu and recommendations.

Unlike other defragmenting utilities, Diskeeper will also defragment your directories. Although directories represent small clusters of data, they represent the "navigation" which your computer follows to acquire the rest of the data on the disk. If the directories are fragmented, the delays in acquisition are compounded even when the data itself is defragmented. This feature of Diskeeper made it a primary choice for even our Windows 95-98 systems. Since Diskeeper also works in Alpha processors, you can install it in your new Compaq and legacy DEC machines.

Diskeeper's advanced routines also allow the user to adjust the size of chunks, or clusters, with which the computer sill store data in the future. Although it will take longer to write data, using smaller clusters will often result in less wasted space. A bit of experimentation here is in order, especially if you use the drives for nonlinear editing, where speed of write and read is one of the most essential attributes of quality.

Diskeeper from Executive Software is, in our opinion, an essential component for any computer user working in WindowsNT. We couldn't work without it.