Just got my Dec issue of WindowsITPro mag today (great mag btw). In it is an eye opening article on the performance degradation that can occur by letting your disks fragment. The article is sponsored by Diskeeper, but the dude who wrote it is not employeed by Diskeeper. If you didn't already know...the Defrag tool in Windows is a scaled down version of Diskeeper...wonder how much Bill paid to get that in every copy of Windows?
The author goes through a series of tests and the results are more significant than I previously assumed. He created a baseline image that had no fragmentation then used a tool called SimFrag.exe to create 3 reproducable levels of fragmentation on a drive: low, medium, and high
Microsoft Word ... a 30MB file took 10s (medium fragmentation) to 30s (high fragmentation) longer to open. Saving a 30MB file took 21s (medium frag) to 44s (high frag) to save!
Internet Explorer ... fetching 10 170K non-cached web pages took 9s (medium frag) to 27s (high frag) longer to load!
AVG Anti-virus ... scanning a 500MB folder of various files took 63s (medium frag) to 116s longer to scan!
MS Anti-spyware ... scanning that same 500MB folder took 60s (medium frag) longer to scan!
The author used the full blown version of Diskeeper on the disks and then reran all the tests. As you might guess since Diskeeper sponsored this article, the disk performance was back very close to it's non-fragmented state. He also measured fragmentation that occurs with general tasks...like installing XP Pro created 439 fragmented files right of the bat. Surfing 1500 sites web pages created 2396 fragmented files. It obviously goes into more depth about how he tested and there's a lot more resultant data in the article.
We all know hard drives are the bottleneck in today's PC's ... so keeping them highly tuned is needed to keep your system speedy. I already knew it's important to defrag occasionaly, I just didn't realize how quickly and how much of an impact fragmentation has on a system. The author recommends daily defrags for critical boxes and weekly for everything else.
I mean honestly, how many of you out there think about defraging all your workstations given all the all tasks on your plate? Regretably, I don't think we've ran defrag on a single PC at Granger in the 2 years I've been here...yikes! At least when people get a new system or we ghost their PC they're getting a drive that's defragged.
So now the question ... how are YOU managing defraggin' the drives on all your workstations? How often? Obviously for a price Diskeeper has a slick enterprise defrag tool that has all sorts of automation and reporting. The built in windows defrag has no automation unless you figure some way to run it via scripts or maybe GPO's. What I'm not going to do is go around to all 140 PC's and defrag each one by hand :-)
Back in the day, I used to defrag every machine weekly. Of course, this was when there were only 20 PCs and I would stay at work all thru the night getting the job done, as well as doing Windows updates over an ISDN line.
Times changed and defraging fell off the priority list. At the job I'm at now, 95% of all work is done via Terminal Services, so local drive fragmentation isn't really an issue as long as the servers get their TLC weekly.
There are numerous Network-scale defrag tools out there (found with a google search) but I have not personally tried any of them. I think I may start testing these after reading this article.
Posted by: Joshua Gregory | December 09, 2005 at 09:53 AM
I don't mess with more than 4 or 5 PC's at a time, so netowrked defrag would be overkill. But I do use Norton's Speed Disk intstead of the Windows defrag. There may be an enterprise version like all the other norton tools. Comes with System Works normally. Not only does it defrag, it lets you set the order of the files on the drive. Other tweaks as well, which I don't have the knowledge to fully take advantage of, but cool none the less.
Posted by: Chris Marsden | December 09, 2005 at 03:24 PM
I don't mess with more than 4 or 5 PC's at a time, so netowrked defrag would be overkill. But I do use Norton's Speed Disk intstead of the Windows defrag. There may be an enterprise version like all the other norton tools. Comes with System Works normally. Not only does it defrag, it lets you set the order of the files on the drive. Other tweaks as well, which I don't have the knowledge to fully take advantage of, but cool none the less.
Posted by: Chris Marsden | December 09, 2005 at 03:31 PM
OK, I don't want to keep tooting my Linux horn... well, yes I do.
Most Linux filesystems (and there are at least 5 to choose from) are inherently resistant to fragmentation. I've never known a Linux admin (including myself) who uses a defragmenter because it is simply not needed.
Posted by: Brian Glass | December 12, 2005 at 11:07 AM
Brian - that's slick. I figured everyone had to mess with defrags.
Posted by: Jason Powell | December 13, 2005 at 12:49 AM
This might be a starting point:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/win2003/defrag.mspx
Posted by: Daniel Reznicek | December 13, 2005 at 01:36 AM