Xbox Hardrive Defrag
 

I was just wondering if there will ever be a need or a way to defrag the HD with the adding and removing of save and music data?

I sent this question to Xbox.com, but haven't gotten a reply yet.

In reality with the seek time on modern HDs youre not really getting any benefit from defraging your PCs HD let alone the boxs.

From http://members.cox.net/xboxfaq/faq.htm :

joltaddict, what you said is wrong. Defragging is still a very important part of pc maintenance and when you go to fix a pc that is grinding to a halt it is one of the first things you do.

It does nothing. It would allow you to fit more data on a hard drive but it has absolutely no bearing on performance. All youre doing is rearranging the data to be more compact. Its a myth. If a help desk guy tells you to defrag and reboot that means he has no idea whats causing the problem.

I tried to find a benchmark I saw before where they deliberately fragmented EVERY file on a volume, and had the free space broken up into "worst-case" fragments on top of that. Then they ran some tests where they only access a couple of files at a time and it was slightly slower than the non-fragmented volume. SHOCKER!!!! It doesnt affect performance or responsiveness in any real world use.

Ironically the bench was using this to show why defragging was so important. And no, I dont believe the moon landing was staged. ;)

uh, thats completely wrong dude, it doesnt save any space at all. defragment puts all the files that are running with the same program in the same physical location on the hard drive, so it doesnt have to seek different areas all over the disk

it does help performance too, especially on bigger hds, like mine :P

I meant that by having all bits adjacent you could theoretically fit more data on a completely full disk so if by "completely wrong" you mean "right" than OK. :p

And if you can find one (just one) benchmark showing a measureable improvement in a real world app consider me converted.

Hard drives still require defragmentation for "best performance". With my 120GB drive if I go 3 weeks without a defrag applications are slower to launch. Even at work i'll defrag that drive every couple of weeks since I have to launch multiples windows at once and I have better things to do then watch "Hour Glasses" while an application lauches. I hate having to sit at another desk becuase the system performance is so bad since they never defrag thier drive.

Getting back to the XBox it should not matter since your running the game off the DVD mostly

BTW...
Tomshardware on hard drive defragmentation

From that link...
"Although fragmentation has no direct influence on access time (it does not matter if a file is fragmented or not), the read/write heads may finish reading the last file fragment at a different position than they started. Unfortunately, cache algorithms cannot cope with this effect. At reduced efficiency, the cache memory won't be able to speed up the hard drive any more."

You realize thats measured in milliseconds dont you? Thats one one thousandth of a second. Any system performace you think your seeing is a placebo effect. Thats why I said show me a benchmark of a real word app. No offense I just dont think anybody can tell the diffence in an app launching in fractions of a second less on a defrag drive (on cache only no less).

Ask and you shall recieve
PDF Summary of performance increases by a drive defragmented by diskkeeper vs fragmented drive

;)

That's so wrong. If you don't defrag it will greatly reduce your access time. I've seen them so bad that it won't get past 1% while defraging. 750mhz seem like 250mhz.

Thanks for the link ctyner.

I got this reply from Xbox.com

quote:
Thank you for writing to Xbox.

Regarding your inquiry about Xbox, you asked about a feature that unfortunately Xbox does not currently offer. However, we might do so in the future because we review all customer comments regularly and use them to help plan new improvements.



As for the defrag not helping performance is wrong wrong wrong. A co-worker has had his computer for 3.5 years and has never defragged it ever. He was complaining that it was running real slow and I told him to go ahead and defrag it. It took him over 8 hours to defrag his 10G HD. After that he said it is fast as hell!!

That looks a whole lot like the one I was looking for earlier. Much less detail too. 109% improvement!!! WOW! So instead of taking 1.4 thousandth of a second its taking around 3 thousandths of a second? Where do I sign up? :p
And the details of it were even worse, they artificially fragmented the drive to an extent that normal use would never create. Plus how long does this performance increase last? They did the bench right after the defrag. Would a days worth of normal use put it back closer to where it started? Should I defrag at the end of every day? After every program? Every hour? How can I hold on to that precious 0.001 second?

Sound like the problem was less the fragmentation than something else. 8 hours? It sounds like it kept restarting until it found a away around the error or bad sectors.

that is not true. Seek times are reduced and I don't need a benchmark or a help desk person to tell me that defragging is needed to keep a system running at peak performance. I see it every single day. When a system gets fragmented it does not work as well as when it is defragged.

I've seen a hard drive so bad that the defrag would not get past 1%. And if you want to see a system run slow. This PC had a lot of applications installed and uninstalled. To fix this problem the hard drive needed to be reformatted.

If you had to reformat the problem was not fragmentation. If you cant get defrag to run does everybody assume the problem is fragmentation? :confused: Thats not likely.

http://www.thirdring.net/tips/pcmyths.htm
For the most part, this is just not true -- although there is a small grain of truth here. The reality is that the increases you will see in both performance and free space are negligible, and will more than likely be negated after a couple of hours of normal usage. Defrag utilities date back to the early days of computing, when disk drives were small and slow (at least relative to what you see today). And back then, yes -- occasionally defragging your hard drive would yield some sustained benefits. But with the size and speed of today's drives, defragging a drive is for the most part a waste of time.

Sometimes you will also hear someone suggest defragging the hard drive as a solution to some type of problem with a program that is not working correctly (i.e., program or system crashes). That's total hogwash. All a defrag does is re-organize the data on your hard disk. There's just no way that's going to fix a misbehaving program! As with Myth #1, don't ever let a tech support person tell you a defrag is the answer to your problem.

http://www.arachne.cz/index.shtml?clanekid=53
Myth #1: Defrag will speed up your disk.
Wrong. Defrag by itself is almost useless. It can even make your disk problems WORSE. Defrag only organizes the files already on your disk to make sequential access within each file possible. So, each file BY ITSELF can be read faster. If the many files you need are spread all over the disk instead of being organized together there will be no improvement. Plus, the process of defragging moves clusters around and will spread the available empty clusters randomly between your defragged files guaranteeing that any new, and ALL transient files, will be severely fragmented. The only thing that is worthwhile is a full optimize wherein all files in the partition will be organized in sequential clusters and moved toward the front of the disk, squeezing out empty clusters. This leaves the empty space defragged.Test example on a 20Mhz '386 with 32mb C: partition: (PCDOS3.3)
Initial speedchk: 2:00, 2:03 total.
After defrag:2:21, 2:24 total,that's 17% worse.
After compacting:1:23, 1:24 total, almost twice as fast as defragged.

Placebo. :)
So in other words... "I dont care what the numbers say I believe it".

I am a support tech. Most of the time it's temp files is why the pc is running slow. I've seen them as high as 4500 before.

Dude, what are you smoking (wait, don't answer that). The first link is talking about database fragmentation in Oracle, the second about the Windows paging file.

So was I before I got a real job.

This is flat out FUD.

The paging shows how HDs work which some here dont seem to grasp. The PDF is the wrong one. :o

Dude you support 2 applications PTC and POS partner. Doesn't take alot of skill too support 2 apps.

Naw 'g, it's talking about the paging file being fragmented, not the whole drive.