Follow up to defrag validity discussion: please read
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From: Cronos on 10 Jan 2010 06:43 David Brown wrote: >Some of it is > due to commercial forces - there are companies making a living out of > selling defragmentation software, and they need people to believe it > makes a difference. Oh, I know all about those lies. I signed up for a demo of Diskeeper once and they incessantly spammed me with claims of how it would make my games and such run so much faster. And I thought false advertising is illegal? Needless to say, I ended up putting a block on them sending me email.
From: Cronos on 10 Jan 2010 06:45 Arno wrote: > Hehe. Cut the nwecomers some slack, most wise up pretty fast. > > Arno I'm not a newcomer. Been occasionally frequenting this group since 1994 or so. Yes, I have had conversations with you before and you never called me rude before either.
From: Cronos on 10 Jan 2010 06:48 Timothy Daniels wrote: > Unless, of course, the defrag is done when the computer > isn't being used... But then, most people must like to watch, > judging by the complaints when Microsoft abandoned the > pretty file fragmentation map in Vista's defragger GUI. I > must admit, though, that I liked watching the map, too. It > was very satisfying to see the red lines disappear, to be > replaced by solid blue regions. > > *TimDaniels* > > Defraggler has the old style colored blocks so is even better to watch. :)
From: David Brown on 10 Jan 2010 07:21 Cronos wrote: > David Brown wrote: >> Some of it is >> due to commercial forces - there are companies making a living out of >> selling defragmentation software, and they need people to believe it >> makes a difference. > > Oh, I know all about those lies. I signed up for a demo of Diskeeper > once and they incessantly spammed me with claims of how it would make my > games and such run so much faster. And I thought false advertising is > illegal? Needless to say, I ended up putting a block on them sending me > email. Diskkeeper are particularly bad at this - and they are well-known as spammers. You can expect that a number of the defrag enthusiasts you have come across are astroturfers - they are either directly or indirectly in the pay of commercial forces pushing defragmentation software (I'm not accusing any particular company of using these tactics, but I do know that some do it). Look out in particular for anyone recommending commercial products in a suspicious manner - if you feel you /must/ defrag, stick to the windows built-in defragger, or use one of the many free packages.
From: Arno on 10 Jan 2010 10:35
David Brown <david.brown(a)hesbynett.removethisbit.no> wrote: > Cronos wrote: >> David Brown wrote: >> >>> Nothing came close to being a sensible explanation of the claimed >>> effects. >>> >> >> OK, I sent them your comments and am not going to post any more on the >> subject. I will just have to find out for myself because there sure are >> lots of people out there giving false info if what you say is correct, >> an awful lot. > There are indeed lots of people, many claiming to be experts, giving > false information on many subjects in IT - fragmentation is only one of > them. All too true. And many want to sell you some product, which makes it even worse. > Some of these are historical - fragmentation definitely used to be a > major problem in the DOS/Windows world (*nix and other systems all > handle fragmentation far better, and always have done). Interestingly, I recently stumbled over a case of a really badly fragmented ext2 Linux filesystem or rather a bunch of really fragmented files. This is so rare that there is no current defragmenter, the respective project was canceled AFAIK, because nobody needed it. The thing that happened here is that some application created a large sparse file and then filled it in in random places until full. Defragging is still easy, just copy the file once and delete the original. After scripting that, the problem is gone. > Some of it is > due to commercial forces - there are companies making a living out of > selling defragmentation software, and they need people to believe it > makes a difference. Indeed. > Sometimes it is due to mixing other effects ("I > cleared out my cache and temp directories, ran a registry tidier, ran a > spyware/adware remover, and defragged my disk - now the system runs > faster. Therefore defragging makes a difference"). This falls under "magic" to me, i.e. people not understanding what actually has which effect. > Ultimately, only /you/ can say if defragging makes a difference for > /you/, on /your/ system, and the way /you/ use the computer. There are no good benchmarks for fragmentation and its effect depends heavily on a lot of factors. Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans |