Totally New defragging way: should do a better defrag

[Henry]

I just thought of a simple way of defragging:

"Phase 1: Analyze"
Analyze and create a percentage of how big the zones should be, which files are in wrong zone, and which file is fragmented.
       Use 5 zones set based on file stuff:
       Zone 1: Directories
       Zone 2: normal files (files used in 1 year)
       Zone 3: Space hogs used in one year
       Zone 4: Less used files (last modified or executed 1 year ago)
       Zone 5: Space hogs not used in 1 year

"Phase 2: Sorting"
Move files around and try to place them as near to the start of the zone as possible.  Remove entries after moving each file.

"Phase 3: Locking Gaps"
1. check if the drive has more than 15% free (this is vital) or skip phase
2. lock little gaps smaller than 10mb on drive (leave at least 15% of gaps)

"Phase 4: Fix-up"
Scan for fragmented files and find the closest empty gap in the zone.  If it can't find any, split up into the less fragments.

"Phase 5 : Packing up files"
Defragment files that are fragmented in Zone 1,2 and 4.
1. move a files towards the start of each zone.
2. Whenever it has finished moving a file, check the gap after it to see if it can fit any of the fragmented files in the list.  
3. Check the gap after that to see if it can fit any file AFTER the gap (no matter fragmented or not, fragmented top piority).
4. Repeat until nothing can fit the gap
5. Repeat step 1 to 4 until the zone has only one gap and has no files left to defragment.

There should be no need to defragment Zone 3 and 5 because files should have been moved away.[/quote]

[Soichiro]

Not bad, but I see two big problems. The first one regarding the space hogs, is that you can't have it based on access time because a lot of people have the setting disabled in NTFS to record last file access time, and I believe it's disabled by default in Vista. The second one is that the packing up files phase would take a very long time. Finding perfect fits for files isn't as simple as it seems, and with your method, it sounds like the defragger would have to move most of the files on the disk. Assuming you have 300GB of data on your hard drive, this would be the equivalent of transferring 300GB of data from one hard drive to another. A regular defrag would only move a small portion of that data (the amount required to get a simple defragmentation and optimization), and would therefore take significantly less time.

[jeroen]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I appreciate it!

In version 4 of JkDefrag I am planning a scripting language that will make it possible to define as many zone's as you want, amongst other things. You can specify exactly what files go into a zone, and how they must be optimized/defragmented.

I'm not sure what you mean by "locking gaps". Please note that JkDefrag is based on the Microsoft defragmentation API. It does not move files by itself, and the api will only move files into free space.

The "packing up files" step that you describe is somewhat similar to the optimization I used in JkDefrag a year ago. The current version tries to combine files to perfectly fill a gap. Taking the largest file that fit's into the gap is a lot faster, but will result in lot's of big gaps at the end of the data that cannot be filled because all files above them are bigger.

[Henry]

i can't find any defrag program that packs up data now... I was wondering if you could include that because my drive has so many fragmented files, and all are internet explorer ones!.   I want to find a defragger which will pack data up so internet explorer can't find a small enough space to get it fragmented: the only space I want to give it is after everything

[Henry]

lacelevel is still over 8.  The only way now which I can see that can lower it by 0.5 is Ashampoo magical defrag which is a trial.
It seems to move files more than defrag, and after moving, a quick scan which windows defrag shows that many files have been packed.

Maybe you could include the way I posted into one of the ways you have. (but since some say it's too hard, you might just keep with 3 zones.).
I thought the microsoft api could lock sectors.  If it can't just skip that.

[jeroen]

can't find any defrag program that packs up data now...

I don't know what you mean with "packs up data". JkDefrag not only defragments all fragmented files, but will also move all files to the begin of the disk, without any gaps between. This is called Disk Optimization. For more information see the JkDefrag homepage.

lacelevel is still over 8.  The only way now which I can see that can lower it by 0.5 is Ashampoo magical defrag which is a trial.

Sorry, I don't know what "lacelevel" means.

[boco]

http://www.disklace.com/

[jeroen]

http://www.disklace.com/

Thanks for the link, I appreciate it! I have taken a look but I cannot use that program, my disks are bigger than 80Gb. The website is full of commercial hype and blabla, and has zero factual information about how the "lacelevel" is calculated. So I don't know.