Thanks Foxbat,
Here's even more about Vista's defragging, again via Aumha's forum.
Disk Defragmenter FAQ wrote:
Why did you simplify the Disk Defragmenter interface?
The Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter was simplified primarily for the purpose of removing it out of the face of the user. It runs periodically and keeps your file system fragmentation at acceptable levels, making it unnecessary for you to launch the tool itself. With the new UI, you can see that we really don't want defrag to be something that people have to worry about, just like any number of other low-level capabilities in the OS.
The new interface seems “dumbed down.†Why remove all the detail?
Interestingly enough, one of the biggest and consistent complaints we had from users (broad sample here from home users to experienced IT Pros) in the past was that a vast majority of them had no idea what the detailed fragmentation statistics they saw meant. The Windows XP graphical view also had some limitations and inaccuracies that prevented it from being included in Windows Vista. If you really want to keep a close eye on fragmentation, I'd recommend using the command-line tool Defrag.exe.
Why was the defrag progress indicator removed?
Part of the problem with the Windows XP defrag tool was that percent complete was not accurate or meaningful. Depending on the phase of defrag, 1% of progress could take from several seconds to minutes, which made the progress indicator highly unreliable. The difficulty here is that since defrag is a multi-pass process (multiple iterations of file defragmentation and free space consolidation) there is no way to accurately predict when defrag will complete since the number of loop iterations and how long each takes are highly dependent on the layout of the files on the volume, the level of file and free space fragmentation, and the other system activity. While I agree that having no progress is bad, misleading progress I believe is worse. Also, the idea behind the new automated defrag is that users will not have to think about it not worry about the progress it is making. With defrag running regularly, the system will be close to optimal levels of fragmentation, and subsequent defrag runs should not take long.
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Quote: Quote: In XP, defrag program would go, check the current status of the drive and suggest if we should defragment the drive. Then, it would read those files and try to piece their parts as close together as possible in order to remove those fragments and speed up the system. That was pretty much it. A linear process where your computer knew what has to be done pretty much before it even starts.
In Vista, this process is a lot more complicated, but yet a lot more effective. One of the changes is the shadow copy optimization during the defragmentation in a way which optimizes the system and minimizes the space used by the shadow copy. (This space is significantly large; more on this in later posts).
Also, Vista's defrag is smarter in comparison to the XP's defrag because it checks if the amount of time that would take to move files is larger than the performance benefit you gain. If the performance benefit is not too significant, it moves on to other files.
The thing most people complain about is that there is no progress bar. This is because the defragmentation in Vista is non-linear, so there is no way to estimate (correctly) how much time a defrag could possibly take. Instead of trying to show estimates of how much the defragmentation will take, the defrag team worked on a better solution: reducing the impact of defragmentation on your computer by making it use low-priority I/O and low priority CPU, so you can still use it and do what ever it is you do while the defrag is on. No more wait like in XP...
Heck, I'd rather chose not to look at it than wait 3 hours for the process to complete. That was exactly their point of view - remove it from the face of the user, and for those who never use the defrag (and there are many people like this) now they do not have to - it runs itself.
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