[wenc]

This looks like Norton Utilities' Speed Disk. My 8-year-old self really thought that rearranging blocks to be sequential really made the disk faster.

In reality though, the increase in performance was barely noticeable.

[anyfoo]

Aren’t you selling it short? Spinny disks, especially in the days before NCQ/TCQ have a vast imbalance between reading sectors sequentially and positioning the head to a new track. NCQ/TCQ later helped a bit by optimizing the path the head takes (With Physics!) when multiple operations are in the queue, but a completely fragmented disk drive seems like it will underperform noticeable against one where everything is laid out neatly in a linear fashion, at least in some access patterns (reading large files in one go).

But I’d be interested in any real data anyway.

[wenc]

I can't conduct the experiment anymore obviously, but to qualify my perceptions -- if you try to do a linear read from a 90% fragmented filesystem, performance would definitely suck and defragging would obviously provide perceptible benefit.

Most of the time however, my disk was probably only about 30% fragmented (if I recall correctly from Speed Disk). I was running DOS on a FAT file system where there was no swap file or anything that would cause massive fragmentation except deleting and installing programs, and maybe some temp files created by certain programs. The performance delta for me was barely noticeable on a 40MB Seagate IDE drive.

[rwmj]

> I can't conduct the experiment anymore obviously

Why not?

  $ virt-make-fs --type=msdos /usr/share/doc /var/tmp/disk.img
  $ export file=/var/tmp/disk.img
  $ nbdkit eval \
       after_fork=' echo 0 > $tmpdir/read ' \
       get_size=' stat -Lc %s $file ' \
       pread='
           diff=$(($4 - `cat $tmpdir/read`))
           echo $4 > $tmpdir/read
           if [ $diff -lt -10000 ] || [ $diff -gt 10000 ]; then
               # simulate a seek
               sleep 0.1
           fi
           dd if=$file skip=$4 count=$3 iflag=count_bytes,skip_bytes
       '
  $ sudo nbd-client localhost /dev/nbd0
  $ sudo mount /dev/nbd0 /tmp/mnt

The tricky thing is probably making a deliberately fragmented disk image for testing using modern tools.

[sumtechguy]

In Vista defragging was one of my goto's for getting the thing to act nicely.

I would use process monitor from sysinternals to measure which files are loaded as the system boots. Then use jkdefrag/mydefrag to take said list and rebuild drive into different zones. Try to put small files that are used together in the same area of the disk. Put huge things like 'isos/vhds/acrivezips' etc near the end of the drive. Put small frequently used files near the front in used order if possible. Smash out any gaps if possible. This helps NTFS from creating more fragments. Defrag any files that 7zip unarchives immediately as it has a bad habit of creating highly fragmented files (contig from sysinternals). Try to put file index in its own 'area' as one reason it runs so badly is the drive fragmentation it causes to itself. It got so bad I would put the index on its own partition sometimes. Try to put files that fragment frequently in their own 'zone' as NTFS will tend to pick the next available gap to where the file is (not always).

That made a real noticeable difference in perceived speed.

These days with nvme and ssd I might just defrag the files themselves once a year if I feel like it. There is a difference but the perceived is pretty much not there anymore. The difference is there is a chain of sectors in the MFT that windows will have to traverse if you ask for something in the middle of a file. That is about the only thing you save with newer drives. ext4 has a similar issue. But it seems to be better about picking spots where it will not fragment. It will however fragment badly in low space conditions. Most filesystems will.

[rzzzt]

With FAT, you are constantly jumping between the table at the beginning of the disk to get the next cluster number and the data, unless disk caching pulled it in RAM.

[ygra]

I remember that being a reason why the MFT in NTFS is positioned in the middle of the drive so that on average the head has to travel less. And NTFS also supports putting small file contents directly into the MFT entry, which also cuts down on head movement. Nowadays all that probably is moot and a relic from ancient times (although I still have enough hard drives running at home).

[jaclaz]

Not really.

First thing the middle of the volume/partition is not the middle of the disk in any multi-partitioned disk, then NTFS $MFT is not (and never has been) in the middle of the partition, its location varies depending on the size of the volume/partiton but above a certain size, around 5/6 GB it is at a fixed offset, usually on LCN #786432 which - on a normal 8 KB/cluster NTFS volume - amounts to offset 6,291,456 sectors or 6,442,450,944 bytes, rarely the middle of the volume, unless its size is around 13 GB.

[fuzzfactor]

Have you found the difference between formatting NTFS in older Windows versions compared to the recent releases?

Seems to me the MFT was in the middle of volumes commonly in older versions, and lately much closer to the beginning of the volume.

Could have something to do with the feature of shrinking a volume which became more common, and you can now more often shrink an NTFS volume by more than half, which was often impossible in earlier years.

[jaclaz]

I have not enough data/experience for more recent Windows versions, but at least up to 7 (and starting from Windows 2000, the NTFS in NT 3.51 and 4.00 had some differences) the MFT start address is variable up to a certain volume size (as said if I recall correctly the switch to "fixed" is between 5 and 6 GB.

If you "think in hex" the address is in the PBR expressed in clusters (VCN) as "0xC0000" (at offset 0x30 or 48 dec you should find "00000C000000000"), which is a nice, round number.

Maybe you remember the "old" NTFS format (NT 3/4) where the mirror of the bootsector (aka $BootMirr, not the $MFT)was exactly in the middle of the volume, but since Windows 2000 this copy of the first sector of the PBR was moved in the "gray zone" at the end (inside the partition but outside the volume[1]).

As a side note (and JFYI) thanks to (from 7 onwards) NTFS resizing capabilities it is possible to "force" the $MFT to very early sectors, see this only seemingly unrelated thread here:

http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=18022

[1] some info on the matter in this other, as well seemingly unrelated, thread:

http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=18034

[rzzzt]

HPFS definitely put the root directory in the "seek center": http://spider.seds.org/spider/OS2/HPFS/dirs.html

This now makes me wonder whether the middle disk block (numerically) is equal "seek times" away from disk edges.

[chj]

But a defrag FAT jumps much much less, because the cluster slots allocated to the same file will be close to each other, often in the same sector. I would be surprised if DOS doesn't optimize for this case.

[NavinF]

Defrag absolutely helped in the winxp days if your HDD was always >90% full. Every chunk of data written to a full HDD would get spread across the platter, cutting your read and write IOPS to a fraction of what you expect. It was especially noticeable on laptops since their platters spin slower.

[mrich]

For most file systems performance suffers at latest at the 90% full mark, if not before.

[whoopdedo]

Faster disk access was one selling point. But as I recall the primary reason to defrag was to prevent problems caused by long FAT chains. And when something did go wrong, contiguous files were easier to recover from the damaged filesystem.

[seanhunter]

It made a massive difference on spinny disks because of the elevator algorithm and the time it took to relocate physical heads and spin the disks around.

[neltnerb]

I suppose it solves the support staff's problem of convincing a customer that they fixed an issue.

[aidenn0]

A fragmented hard drive was so much faster than a defragmented floppy disk that I was happy either way.

[nirav72]

Also quieter. I remember the satisfaction I felt after defragging the drive and no longer hearing the driving thrashing around on the smallest read operation.