Fast or Slow optimize?

[rich]

Newbie here again! What are the performance advantages and disadvantages of using the Slow Optimization/Fast Update schedule as opposed to using a daily Fast Optimization script? Excuse my slowly increasing understanding of this awesome utility, but are there any advantages to one or the other, or does it depend on the what I need from my computer? Any opinions would be greatly appreciated. Also, I understand that this is in early beta stage (and I love the JKDefrag), but even at Beta 3, I think that this utility is far superior to anything else (free OR paid). Thanks.
Rich

[CLRS530]

Without really looking at the scripts I think that slow optimize uses sorting by name which is important for the windows installed partition and for partitions with programs and games. If you have data partitions slow optimize has almost no affect.
With name sorting the files in a directiorie will be put together and they can be fastly accessed.

[rich]

Reiterated: In the opinion of you experienced script tweakers, which script (Slow Optimize/Fast Update or Fast Optimize) yields the best performance results?

[poutnik]

Alternative is to define extra zone with directoryname("windows") or fullpath("c:\windows\*") parameter.
Or similar for particular game.

[jeroen]

What are the performance advantages and disadvantages

Using Fastoptimize on a totally unorganized disk will result in a dramatic speed improvement. Using SlowOptimize instead of FastOptimize will result in even better performance, and will leave fewer gaps on disk. But I have no measurement data to back up either claim.

[rich]

Thanks Jeroen. As I am becoming more adept I appreciate the simple explanations. Every one is a newbie at everything in life at one time. I love your work, it makes Windows more usable!
By the way, I have noticed that the Fast Optimization  leaves less fragmentation than the Slow Optimization/fast update. Why is that? Thanks.

[jeroen]

I have noticed that the Fast Optimization  leaves less fragmentation than the Slow Optimization/fast update.

The SlowOptimizations sorts the files on disk, the FastOptimization only fills gaps. All the sorting fileactions will create fragments. They move all the data to the beginning of the zone in the specified order, but there may be some unmovable files in the way. Instead of leaving gaps (if a file doesn't fit between the last file and the unmovable file), the program will "wrap" the file around the unmovable file by splitting it into fragments. This may seem strange for a defragmenter, but the fragments are aligned and the impact on performance is therefore very small. Skipping the gaps would make all the files slower that are above the gap, because they would then be placed at a slightly slower part of the harddisk than they need to be. The fragments look terrible on the screen and in the statistics, but they are there to make your harddisk faster.

[jm]

I ran Windows XP SP3 in Safe mode, to do a SlowOptimize on my OS-partition, but near the end MyDefrag stalled when processing some file "C:\Documents and Settings\MyLoginName\ntuser.bak"

After an hour processing that same file, I gave up, and closed MyDefrag, but the Task Manager showed MyDefrag was still running for some 4 minutes, before it finally disapeared.

Could this be some bug ? File is only 11.7MB ? 

Also, I see that MyDefrag is taking a very long file for the smalled (4.096 bytes) files, mostly it is processing these files longer than some 500MB files ? Is that normal please ?

TIA!

[jeroen]

MyDefrag is based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft, a system library that is included in Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and 2008. Most defragmenters are based on this API, including commercial defragmenters. Basically all MyDefrag does is send "move this file to that location" commands to the API. The API is extremely solid, but has it oddities. From JkDefrag I know that it can sometimes "hang" on a file, or take a long time on an innocuous little file. I don't know why and there is not much I can do about it. That said, it is of course possible that MyDefrag beta contains a bug somewhere, but you are the first to report these two problems for MyDefrag.