Sunday, April 22, 2007

Defragmentation ... thats for ancient OS's right?

Thanks to Carlton to get me thinking about disk performance again. He just put together a nifty 1TB NAS system so I was benchmarking some basic disk copy on my Hot-Shite RAID=0 system ... expecting to blow him out of the water ...
when I tried to copy a 1.4G file ...
First I copied it from internal to external firewire ... that went prety fast, 57 seconds. So I tried from internal disk array to itself (C: to C:) and WHAT ? 2 minutes 30 seconds !!! ... no way ....

So I spent a long time looking at various things like BIOS RAID settings, "write cache" disabled, even gave DELL a chat ... (funny, they just said "We just test that the drives 'work' thats all). And to pour salt into my open wounds ... my friend Carlton has an identical disk drive ("raptor") but not in a RAID-0 (no raid) and his was copying the same file size in 48 sec ! ARGGG ... it cant be SO !!! RAID-0 is supposed to be faster then no raid ! not 3x slower !

My brain was racking ... why so slow ? I even dusted off some benchmark programs I had run when the system was new, and it came up with the same hard drive speeds as before ... ARG ...

In the "old days" a fragmented drive could cause problems like this .. but I thought that NTFS was beyond that. Furthermore, I was just trying to copy 1 file to 1 file, not create a bunch of small files. There as 30% free space on the drive and windows defrag showd lots of free contigous space so it should be efficient ..

I downloaded the pro version of Diskkeeper, set it to auto-defrag and let it run overnight. Next day, I tried the same test on the same file ... and the copy took only 45 seconds !! YES !!! Defragmentation to the rescue. I'm sold. I'm going to buy the pro version and just let it run to its hearts content.

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