Registry being a small file, compacting/defragging would not likely have
much effect IMO.
Could it be that 7200rpm drives with ultra low random seek times, larger
cache and better cache algorithms have rendered defrag a waste of time?
Law of diminishing returns?
I've said before, unless you can empirically setup the fragmentation,
who knows if it's just not fragged enough to make measurable impact or
if defrag is a waste. Though now I'm guessing if a synthetic drive
benchmarking shows that extreme random seeks are only a few ms longer
that linear reads, then defrag will be dead from a performance enhancing
standpoint. Exceptions might be reading or writing a huge file in real
time such as doing video capture, or simultainiously accessing multiple
files.
A side note, I'll bet defrag makes "changed" disc image backups larger
since sectors get rearranged en masse. Of course if the data is the
same, sectors could just be remapped at the cost time doing pre-backup
table building.
Certainly doesn't make we want to part with an $$$ for another defrag
program or put up with my pc being tied up by one running. As it is I
haven't been running the past few months.
Thane Sherrington (S) wrote:
I'm still working on the "does defrag matter" question. Up 'til now,
I've thought there was some improvment, using the the test of copying
all files to /dev/nul to test overall file reading speed.
Today I decided to test start up and shut down times on a single
machine. I ran two tests and averaged the speeds. This isn't
definitive, but it is interesting.
Before I did anything the times were:
Start up (to login prompt): 50.35 seconds
Shut down (from login prompt): 13.98 seconds
Then I ran Reghealer to clean up the registry, then NTRegOpt to defrag it:
Start up (to login prompt): 54 seconds
Shut down (from login prompt): 18.28 seconds
Then I ran PerfectDisk, did an offline defrag then a Smartplacement defrag:
Start up (to login prompt): 51 seconds
Shut down (from login prompt): 30.27 seconds
So it looks to me like cleaning and optimizing the registry doesn't do
much for you, and apparently PerfectDisk really screws up the shutdown
speeds, while doing nothing for the startup.
So right now, I'd say defragging is useless.
T
