Cached defragmentation (for removable volumes)

[Thaliur]

Hi Jeroen,
it's me again.
During the last few days I've been trying to create a perfect defragmentation script for a rockbox-driven iPod.
While watching the program do its work, I noticed that all the file movements are really slow, since the iPod harddisk is - of course - connected via USB, and also seems to be pretty slow anyway.

So I got the idea that it might be possible, since the iPod harddisk is much smaller than my "real" harddisk, to copy all of its contents on the PC harddisk, arrange the files as desired, and then move everything back onto the external harddisk, in the correct layout.

I don't know if it is possible, but I'm sure it would be a great improvement.
This way, the external drive not only gets defragmented faster, it also suffers less write cycles (although it's not that important for a harddisk), and - since most external drives are still formatted as FAT volumes - directories could be optimized as well.

Basically, it would only be necessary to copy the complete drive contents, files and directories, on the local harddisk and copy them back according to the script commands.

Of course, this should be optional.
I'd really like to see this, maybe in MyDefrag 5.0, I guess it would be a pretty big addition to the defragmentation engine.

[jeroen]

Thanks for sharing your idea, I appreciate it. But no, I am sorry. It would only be faster for the first run, after that the daily script would be faster. The amount of work for me to build such a thing would be huge, because it is a total departure from how MyDefrag does things now. And all that just to save users a bit of time, only on the first run and only for small secondary disks. Sorry....

[jonib]

So I got the idea that it might be possible, since the iPod harddisk is much smaller than my "real" harddisk, to copy all of its contents on the PC harddisk, arrange the files as desired, and then move everything back onto the external harddisk, in the correct layout.

I don't believe this is that efficient as you will always need to copy all data from a slow HDD and then back even slower.

But if you want to test it. You could use a disk imaging tool that supports .VHD files and make a image of the iPod hdd then mount it as a local disk (builtin in Win7, Vista and XP needs extra software). Then defrag with MyDefrag, and when finished write the image back to the iPod hdd.

jonib

[Thaliur]

So I got the idea that it might be possible, since the iPod harddisk is much smaller than my "real" harddisk, to copy all of its contents on the PC harddisk, arrange the files as desired, and then move everything back onto the external harddisk, in the correct layout.

I don't believe this is that efficient as you will always need to copy all data from a slow HDD and then back even slower.

But if you want to test it. You could use a disk imaging tool that supports .VHD files and make a image of the iPod hdd then mount it as a local disk (builtin in Win7, Vista and XP needs extra software). Then defrag with MyDefrag, and when finished write the image back to the iPod hdd.

jonib

That's a good idea, I think I will try it.
I also expected that it would be a lot of work to implement. If I had sufficient programming experience I would try it myself, but I guess I couldn't manage to do it.

I still think it would be faster though, as the way MyDefrag works now also reads all the files and copies them back again, but multiple times, each file twice or more often in my case. But it would really only make a difference during the first run, so I guess it's really not worth it. I can wait

I thank you for considering it, though.