Defrag Recommendation?

Uh, I have a couple of those new SATA II Seagate 750's for storage one formatted FAT32 one NTFS5. They "size in" at at 698GB under XP Pro and work well. The data stack loaded no problem; DVD Vobs and large file movies mostly on t he NTFS5 drive, and the usual smaller avi (et al) movie file sizes on the FAT32 HDD.

I went to defrag using Diskeeper 9 Pro and it would not let me claiming a 500GB limit. I want to take the opportunity to see if ATS folks may have some ideas on defrag software other than Diskeeeper or Raxco that'll handle humungo-drives and run under a 100 bucks US per workstation before I buy Diskeeper 10. I'd prefer not to use a defrag server if at all avoidable. Thanx eh,

Victor K.

[edit on 4-8-2006 by V Kaminski]

OO Defrag should be able to handle it, its the best defrag app I've come acros so far (states on the website that if Windows recognizes the space, OO will too) its only 45 to 50$ too.

I used the server version on a box that had a 4TB drive aray with the largest data partition being 2TB (the limit)

Why are you using FAT32 on 1 drive anyways? Its not faster then NTFS anymore and NTFS brings quite a bit of improvements and dataprotection measures with it.



[edit on 4/8/06 by thematrix]

Hey thanx, I'll be sure and check out OO - never heard of it before... I use FAT32 on some storage drives and on some machines for OS drives because I don't like the hassles of runnin' Winternals or any of the various other NTFS access/recover tools when "bad stuff" happens. Fat32 is way easier to fix to my way of thinking and experience.

I don't really require the extra security of the NTFS file system on personal unimportant stuff. I do like being able to access and edit stuff unrestricted using edit/attrib etc from a 98' DOS environment on a single floppy. At work we have far greater security requirements and many of our machines use disk encryption software and a couple use sort of a dongle-thingy card/slot deal that hooks up SCSI to the HBA's as hardware keys. At home and work are very different environments.

My main reason for using FAT 32 on at least one storage drive is I like to use the old Ghost 7.5 Enterprise for network disk isystem mage backups as Ghost 7.5 can read but not write to NTFS volumes. Just my way to do stuff. I tried some of the XML system backup stuff... not pretty.

Thanx for the help eh and I'll check out OO for my home problem. Sounds like the hot ticket.

BTW have you any experience with Lucent InPhase drives? Neat stuff 300GB per cartridge - holographic storage medium. We have a proto for work that we were testing and I loaded one up with movies and it worked great when I had it home over last weekend... but it is "LARGE" in size and coin outlay - hooks up e-SATA or SCSI. I think we'll adopt that system and lullabye our LTO library. The LTO tape room is total hassle and costs a fortune.

Thanx again 'trix,

Victor K.

EDIT: I just d/l'd the UG - looks fine 63 pages and I sent the support query email a note asking about Pro v8.5 just to make sure it's supposed to work like I want. Thanks again,

Victor K.

[edit on 4-8-2006 by V Kaminski]

I've read alot about it and went to a product unveiling from Lucent and Avaya where they showed this tech too. I was there for Avaya but well, a geek is always happy to see the rest of the toys too :p

The last 2 years alot has been done in the field of mass storage and harddrive storage, while imho they should be focusing on RAM capacity and speed instead, preferably, like IBM's MRAM and Holoram tech, RAM types that remembers their state, even if there is completely no power, this will reduce system bootups to null and the latency's in these types of ram are extremely low.

I prefer to look for the lowest capacity drives I can posibly when its for desktops, preferably 4 40GB ATA133 drives in a raid config, because a lot of space is unneeded and asking for trouble on desktops imho.

For filestoreage and stuff, its better to just use a dedicated fileserver in which you incorporate either RAID5 level redundancy or a decent backup system to keep your files safe.

Keeping files you need to keep in storage, like video's, audio and application installers, on your desktop is just asking to loose them imho. Alot can go wrong with the drives themselves, desktops are much more vulnerable to virusses, glitches, spyware, fatal crashes and other data destroying problems then dedicated file storage systems.

My fileserver is simply an older Dual Athlon MP board I picked up for 50$, 2 2nd hand Athlon XP's moded to XP-M's with the SMP bridges linked for 26$ a pop(Athlon XP, MP and XP-M are the same CPU's with their bridges configured differently, but you can unlock the XP-M(mobile) and MP features on athlon xp's too :p) 1GB of DDR ram I had laying around all put into a 10 year old hightower case I still had in the attick.

The only thing that cost anything was the 12 channel 3Ware ATA Raid controller and the yearly or 2 yearly update to larger harddrives, I never go bleeding edge with harddrives either, usualy just midrange models, like now, I just replaced the harddrives for the fileserver with 300GB ones, still giving me a total storage of 2.7TB total space when in the Raid5 arays, while the max for this controller is 3.7TB with 2TB max per Array.

We have some 3ware stuff at work I think we keep the user profiles on it it says RAID5 on the label stuck on the front anyway... my home stuff, I just JBOD as speed for me isn't a biggie and I always like having all media type stuff outted to optical.

I did try one of the Gigabyte RAMDISKs rev 1.3 (I think) - not ready for prime time - lightning fast boot time 8 or 9 seconds - defrag's un under a minute (with no swap file) but smallish at 4GB and it has a habit of blowin' away the file table on reboot or shutdown a little too frequently for my liking... I might try again at some point if they get some fresh firmware and was condidering striping two and see how much jam that has and it works with Ghost as long as you tick the FNI switch in the ini file.

My own OS drive in this box is a 34GB Raptor SATA 150 10000RPM which has given good service. I just got a promise 8 pot SATA II PCI-X bus HDD controller and that's this weekend's project to stick that on a Supermicro X6DAL - B2 I'm gonna set up as my new home box as soon as it is dialed-in and stable.

Thanks for the help and sound advice,

Victor k.

Those Gigabyte RAMDISK drives are good to use as a dedicated SWAP drive.

A single swapfile can only be 4GB in size in Windows XP, so that why the drive is that that size.

Thats also what I ment with the MRAM and Holoram from IBM, they can loose power, be taken out of their slots, driven around the world, put back in and the data is still there :p

Thanks much, I'm not using that Ramdisk any other way than the manufacturer documentation suggested - it's just a fun bit of kit and I was lookin' to see how fast the OS could work free of a rotional drive - very fast and stable - except for the problem I mentioned.

I do realize any volume or portion thereof can be assigned as a "scratch diak" and I am not unaware of the advantages of using and not using a windows type swap file of various sizes and configurations and of the 4096 limit... all the Zontar stuff you mentioned I get all glazed over and send it down to 3 in tech at work. If hear Hybrids drive this and and Quad core blah, blah hype-sales much more an' I'll blow chunks. My favorite box is a decade old O2 with get this a VT100 console... and it does seem hurtin' for many of the tasks I do regularly. It never breaks. And if it does I got two more just for good measure. But I do like x86 stuff too.

We don't use any of that stuff you mentioned yet but I'm sure it works well or you wouldn' t have mentioned it. BTW I will not let an IBM, Dell, or HP box in the office network - just crap value - been there done that, most of our stuff is "in-housed" so we can afford to hire our own people and get build's and architectures our way. TCO is superior for us... or so accounting says. Tech is ubiquitous throughout my day job and we rely heavily on our people and pay them well.

I just don't like those big companies and leases, offers and sleaze-ball salespeople, that's all. We Had some Poweredges and one 6000 and some legacy AS400 - sold it for a song and came up with our own deal where we don't call service - we have it in-house and source all our hardware locally.

Hey, have a great weekend! I'll send you a u2u with a link to some some pics of this xeon twin proc personal build - the CPU sinks are copper and weigh a Ton. Unusual compact layout with 3 power supply connectors as opposed to the two I'm used to... I'm glad Enermax supllied all the right bits. The board size is regular ATX so it'll fit in a pretty standard tower for now - I don't want rack mount stuff at home at all.

I apperciate your help, (ATS is great that way 4sure, I had all I needed at OO actually, thanks and bonus - and I have received an auto-reply to my OO query) and you are obviously very knowledgable and willing to share beyond that of most folks and I look forward to chatting in the future. Thanx eh. I like my toys just fine and your opinion and assitance are valued.

I'll most likely switch over to OO on this machine (on your recommendation) I'm on now with the 750's once I get an answer to my query. The price is right that's for sure.

Victor K.

[edit on 4-8-2006 by V Kaminski]

You guys seen this harddrive yet?

www.hyperossystems.co.uk...

Bit pricey and low capacity, but data access at RAM speed. :drool:

Its the same as the Gigabyte ramdisk thing, just a lil larger capacity.

Trust me, don't install anything on it you want to keep, you'll loose the data it before the week is over.

I haven't used the "hyper" - drive, I haven't seen any of our suppliers here in Scarborough list them either, I think I read an aticle in Anandtech or Tom's, they rated it as "good' but like 'trix says don't put anything on it that you may actually want - to keep; no critical data.

My own experience with the RAM drive by Gigabyte was - OK-ish but every few days on a boot or reboot - poof - no file allocation table - unrecoverable. One other thing - temperature - the RAM drive was cool and in-case temps were significantly lower by 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. The 4 sticks of RAM were warm to the touch but no where near the "thermaling" of any HDD.

I was fortunate that I run Ghost as a regular "thing" - complete system restores happen in 20 or 30 seconds - all restores were without incident. Once some of the hybrid blended "held" state drives or "held" state RAM stuff hits (and is reliable) we will see some pretty awesome "instant" sytems.

I was absolutely blown away by the speed of the GC-RAMDISK and it never "threw" a Red Ball - White "X" from within the OS (WINXP Pro and I tried my fav MS OS W98SE); Just the one problem - it doesn't remember who or what it is sometimes on init. - a serious flaw. The whiz-kids down in tech say their big concern about RAM drives is something they called gate-burn and gate-memory - esoteric and over this senior-citizens head.

One of my Bud's from down at American Computer (Denver office) says they have some drives that they supply to "undisclosed clients" that are reliable and fast and uh, $20K USD each for a 20Gig-er and are only for fiber-bus adapters.

The drives are out of Germany and have something to do with the crew who used to do all the render cards for Elsa... yeah, sooner or later our rotational electro-mechanical "phonograph" HDD's will be a nice quaint historical footnote like the carburetor and bia-ply tires and cars without seat-belts and 10.5" reel to reels and we'll look back - and wonder how we ever got by.

Time to go find a floppy cable - at least 30" long to snake around the Xeons all the way from the bottom of the case to the top slot - used to be common - off-the-shelf even - not any more or less so anyway. I wish I had the tooling to press-up my own ribbons and stuff - anyone hears of a supplier in North America I'd be grateful for a link.

Thanx,

Victor K.

[edit on 5-8-2006 by V Kaminski]

They should incorporate something in the firmware of that drive, so that you can choose to set it as a specific swapdrive and temp storage device, which would, when the computer starts, flush the ramdrive(which happens regularly anyways) and automaticly create a new partition on it.

That was you always have a fresh swap and temp drive running and the problems with the computer starting without the ramdrive being partitioned are gone.

Noone in his right mind will use the device as a permanent storage system anyway.