new to this forum and some ideas

[alex]

Hi all,

First of all thanks Jeroen for writting and making available jkdefrag, I have had a good look at the program and the associated source code, good bit of work.

I have approx 20 years experience of Windows based computing (both general hardware and programming) and totally understand the need for defragmentation to keep disk performance near its best and to increase the lifetime of very busy hard drives. I am in the middle of a software project that uses 1tb SATA drives to store user data, this data has approx 15% data movement per day (a lot), it also contains a cached version of the data on a seperate disk for comparisions, again 15% data movement per day. With the way the project works, files in excess of 50gb are deleted and then re-populated from the clients servers to these hard drives causing quite serious fragmentation within a week or 2. On disk 1 the drive is partitioned with the first 20gb being for the operating system (Windows XP SP3, NTFS of course), the second partition is user data and the second drive is the cached version of the second partiton of the first drive. So with that information I concluded that the c: (Window OS), should use -a 10 to put the oldest files at the start of the drive. On the second partition and second drive using -a 6 to move the files to the back of the drive so that the newly written stuff should go to the front of that partition, does this sound like the right thing to do?


some ideas for you,

1.auto detection of the system drive (where the OS is installed so the defragger will attempt -a 10 on that drive by default.
2.SpaceHogs adding .iso to the list by default.
3.knowing when not running in Safemode so not to process files like pagefile.sys (I guess you cannot process that when windows is running normally), my way round this is to reduce its size defrag and move all the files to the end of the drive and then recreate the larger file.
4.an option to only defrag files over a certain size (or under a certain size), and/or files that were modified in the last x days.
5.unicode support for long file names and paths e.g. CreateFileW rather than CreateFile it looks like you are using this but does it work on very long paths and file names.
6.a list file for the files that you want to have defragged, so that there is only a single pass on the scanning of the disk, this would work like the listfile feature in 7-zip.

Some of these items may have been asked for before and sorry if I am repeating those requests.

Again thanks for writing jkdefrag.


Regards


Alex

[jeroen]

does this sound like the right thing to do?

Well, it's entirely up to you, but why move everything to the end of the disk? I have no idea how Windows decides where to create new files, but it's definitely not the first free space from the beginning of the disk. If fragmentation is your only concern then you might as well move all files to the beginning of the disk. They will be considerably faster there.

1.auto detection of the system drive (where the OS is installed so the defragger will attempt -a 10 on that drive by default.

Thanks for sharing your ideas, I appreciate it! I have put this on the list for v4 of JkDefrag.

2.SpaceHogs adding .iso to the list by default.

These files are usually larger than 50Mb, so will already be classified as spacehogs. The build-in list of extensions is there to catch (less important) small files.

3.knowing when not running in Safemode so not to process files like pagefile.sys

I had something like that in early versions of JkDefrag, but found that maintaining the list is an impossible task. I simply do not know which files are unmovable in which circumstances (such as Windows version, and which services have been started). So I removed the list. Because of this JkDefrag could suddenly move all kinds of system files in Vista, without any changes to JkDefrag, because Vista contained several improvements to the defragmentation API.

4.an option to only defrag files over a certain size (or under a certain size), and/or files that were modified in the last x days.

Will be possible in v4 of JkDefrag.

5.unicode support for long file names and paths

JkDefrag is fully Unicode and has no limits on the length of file names and paths.

6.a list file for the files that you want to have defragged

Will be possible in v4 of JkDefrag.

[Waveweasel]

does this sound like the right thing to do?

Well, it's entirely up to you, but why move everything to the end of the disk? I have no idea how Windows decides where to create new files, but it's definitely not the first free space from the beginning of the disk. If fragmentation is your only concern then you might as well move all files to the beginning of the disk. They will be considerably faster there.

1.auto detection of the system drive (where the OS is installed so the defragger will attempt -a 10 on that drive by default.

Thanks for sharing your ideas, I appreciate it! I have put this on the list for v4 of JkDefrag.

2.SpaceHogs adding .iso to the list by default.

These files are usually larger than 50Mb, so will already be classified as spacehogs. The build-in list of extensions is there to catch (less important) small files.

3.knowing when not running in Safemode so not to process files like pagefile.sys

I had something like that in early versions of JkDefrag, but found that maintaining the list is an impossible task. I simply do not know which files are unmovable in which circumstances (such as Windows version, and which services have been started). So I removed the list. Because of this JkDefrag could suddenly move all kinds of system files in Vista, without any changes to JkDefrag, because Vista contained several improvements to the defragmentation API.

4.an option to only defrag files over a certain size (or under a certain size), and/or files that were modified in the last x days.

Will be possible in v4 of JkDefrag.

5.unicode support for long file names and paths

JkDefrag is fully Unicode and has no limits on the length of file names and paths.

6.a list file for the files that you want to have defragged

Will be possible in v4 of JkDefrag.

7. Jeroen, I want to merge the current partition with the unallocated size.  I believe I am to use Option 5 but how does it work without loosing any data...

[jeroen]

7. Jeroen, I want to merge the current partition with the unallocated size.

You want to make your partition bigger? Then you do not have to move all the data on your disk to the beginning. That's only necessary if you want to make a partition smaller.

I believe I am to use Option 5 but how does it work without loosing any data...

Yes, option 5 will move everything to the beginning of the volume so that you can make the partition smaller. It is impossible to lose data with JkDefrag, there are no dangerous options or combinations or whatever.

Perhaps a tip, take a look at the Gnome Partition Editor.