perfect disc update

[Perris Calderon]

if you have perfect disc, go into the help file, and search for the update

 

[NetRyder]

Cool...thanks for the heads up.

 

[mbunny]

What does Perfect Disc do?

 

[2z]

Originally posted by mbunny
What does Perfect Disc do?

apart from ripping apart linear installs

its got pretty colours

 

[Perris Calderon]

now 2z, you can always turn offf the file placement if you don't like the strategy, and just do a common defrag.

of course, that would just defeat the purpose, and you could use the native uttility for that.

ok, carry on

 

[2z]

I still use the smart placement on C:/ drive cos XP installs itself here there & every where > there's no method to it

smart placement for the OS should be beneficial
its other installed programs that in theory would suffer by having their files relocated on the disc depending on the files attributes

the common defrag on PD is a bit incomplete
it totally ignores contiguous file & just defrags the fragmented files
which makes its really quick
but it doesn't consolidate free space which can only increase overall seek time
resulting in a net loss on performance

I prefer to use a combination of Diskeeper & PD
depending on the drives content & the state of fragmentation

 

[Smoke286]

dealer, you know perfect disk never did get any faster, I decided to stay with Diskeeper

 

[Electronic Punk]

I use Perfect Disk, but I am not one of these mad defragger types.. do like a good defrag tho. ooh.

 

[NetRyder]

Same here....I don't use it that often, but when I do, PD does a great job. Granted it's slower than Diskeeper, but I see that the file-placement strategy works well for me.

 

[napalmnthemorning]

I just updated to build 37 two days ago. I defrag about every day, and Perfect Disk has been the best overall defrag I've tried.

"Yea, maybe its the neat pretty colors all being in order"

What do you guys thinks of SpeedDisk.. I've got it but don't use it..

 

[NetRyder]

SpeedDisk seems to go against Microsoft's defrag strategy by placing the MFT and metadata at the beginning of the disk. PerfectDisk and Diskeeper conform to the MS strategy of keeping the MFT and metadata towards the center of the disk. According to MS, this gives you a 5-10% increase in performance. How far this is noticeable, I don't know. But I find PerfectDisk does the best defrag job, although it's a little slower than Diskeeper when the drive is adequately fragmented.

All in all, I would recommend sticking to PerfectDisk.

 

[2z]

Originally posted by Napalmnthemorni

What do you guys thinks of SpeedDisk.. I've got it but don't use it..

I stopped using it after I noticed I was getting descriptor errors while running chkdsk

Originally posted by NetRyder
According to MS, this gives you a 5-10% increase in performance.

raxco have the same claims
IMHO
a 10% increase in performance would be noticeable without benchmarking tools
I've never noticed a difference
me thinks raxco has jumped on the M$ exaggerated band waggon

 

[Perris Calderon]

Originally posted by TwoZigzagColt45

raxco have the same claims
IMHO
a 10% increase in performance would be noticeable without benchmarking tools
I've never noticed a difference
me thinks raxco has jumped on the M$ exaggerated band waggon

they don't claim a 10 percent increase in overall performance, they claim a 10 percent increase of the performance of the master file table

 

[2z]

Originally posted by dealer
they don't claim a 10 percent increase in overall performance, they claim a 10 percent increase of the performance of the master file table

oh right ok then

What's new in PerfectDisk V5.0?

PerfectDisk's optimal placement of the MFT further onto the disk, has been found by Microsoft to improve system performance by 5 to 10 percent.

I thought they meant overall performance

 

[Perris Calderon]

two z, your philosophy is absolutely correct in a file placement strategy for people that manage their file placement themselves.

for instance, of you have a huge unused drive, of course, the beginning of the drive is the most optimum for a file to be, as there are fewer heads to traverse per the amount if information per revolution.

the idea though, is to put the most accessed files "in the center of the activity"

this doesn't mean in the center of the disc, it means in the area where the heads are going to be most often.

so, if you have wisely separated your most accessed files, and put all of thedse most accessed files in the beginning of the disc, then the center of this beginning area is the ideal place for the most accessed of these files.

but beyond that, for people that don't manage the placement of their files Themsleves, in general, the heads will the majority of time be almost center of all of their files in general, and seek time dominates transfer time for the sake of performance, and therefore, for most people, the center of your files is the best location for often accessed info.

as far as the master file table, here is an area that will be accessed with every bit of disc activity.

obviously, the master file table should be as close to the heads as possible, and this means toward the center of the volume of files

 

[2z]

Originally posted by dealer

obviously, the master file table should be as close to the heads as possible, and this means toward the center of the volume of files

makes sense

as the mft is probably the most accessed part of the the drive
albeit just used as a cross reference for the extended file allocation table leaving the front of the disk free for quicker file seek & transfer times.

thats why I use PD smart placement on the boot drive
XP's file placement is none existent & there's no way to manipulate the file placement without third party apps such as PD

I'm still dubious about M$ claims of a 5% - 10% increase in performance.
especially since speed disk had a noticeable difference on my box in the amount of time it took the desktop to become usable
IMHO the increase in performance by speed disk was easily 10%+

although thats all in the past now for me & no longer relevant on my box
as I don't use ntfs on the boot drive anymore
I have no use for the extra features offered by ntfs
& find fat32 slightly more responsive

 

[Electronic Punk]

Seem to have partition problems on my hdd, tho it seems to work.
(ie partition magic can't open it)

any cool tools I can use to repair it?

ndd or scandisk (loading into xp) didn't work.

 

[2z]

I never bother to try & fix a disk problem
everything gets backed up followed by a low level format

...............................

there's couple o things you could try
Repair the master boot record by using the FIXMBR command from the Windows XP Recovery Console
link

or maybe try a third party app

http://www.partition-recovery.com/partition.htm

http://www.disk-utility.com/hard-drive-partition-check.html

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/DiskPatch.htm

http://highergroundsoftware.com/?hop=eagle11.highergrnd

 

[KWK]

will try....