At 02:46 PM 16/05/2010, maccrawj wrote:
No because just as back then I know of no benchmark that will
exhaustively read all files to determine access times. It's not
going to affect creating a new file & reading it back unless the
drive is so fragmented that 1000's of non-contiguous clusters get
created by the test. Reading all the files before & after is the
only real test AFAIK and I've not done that.
Yeah, that's the test I used. After a year of testing (3-5 computers
per day) I found an average speed increase of 3-5% - too small to be
worthwhile. Perhaps my testing was flawed, but I've also never
managed to get DiskKeeper, PerfectDisk, and their ilk to give me an
actual way to test the supposed improvement they give.
Now as to noticing, yes. Stalker:Call of Private is a streaming
content game which loads massive amounts of data at load and good
sized chunks while roaming around the Zone. Before defragmenting I
was crashing constantly during the accesses or had massive
stuttering. Despite the games other bugs these were the result of
HDD data stalling just long enough to cause the VPU recovery
watchdog to kick in (it's not happening under stress testing with
FutureMark or other games, card is good). Valve's Steam has a
built-in defrag function for similar reasons given the massive
archives that make up their games.
Now that's interesting. I'll start retesting and see what I can find.
T
