NT Disk Defragmentation

You'd probably be surprised at what little disk activity it requires to chop your files into pieces and scatter them across your disk. Have you installed any new applications lately? Automatic installation is great, but temporary files that get copied, unpacked, and deleted create fragmentation. And if you run any services on your system that feature automatic logging, such as tracking security and network events, those files are constantly growing; they fragment a bit at a time.

As your files get spread out and separated from their directory entries, the drives waste time going back and forth from the directory to a chain of file fragments each time they access files. A large disk cache can help hide the problem, but the more you work, the worse performance gets.

Reversing the effects of disk fragmentation is easy to do with a disk defragmentation utility. A good defrag utility will reorganize your files and directories to restore the disk performance you had when your system was new. It collects pieces of fragmented files into single contiguous files for faster access. Some studies have shown file access times dropping by an average of more than 60-percent after defragmenting. Free for thee Despite the fact that a defrag utility has long been standard equipment for other versions of Windows, Microsoft still doesn't provide one with Windows NT. Fortunately, a defrag utility is available for Windows NT--Diskeeper Lite from Executive Software. It handles both FAT and NTFS volumes and you can't beat the price--free for the downloading at: http://www.execsoft.com

Diskeeper Lite works on systems running NT Server or NT Workstation 4.0, service pack 2 or later. In addition, Diskeeper Lite is available in versions for x86, PowerPC, and Alpha systems.

After you download the appropriate DKLite ZIP file, move it to a temporary directory on your Windows NT system. Use a decompression utility, such as Winzip, to unpack the ZIP file. To install and run the utility, you must be logged on to an account with Administrator privileges. From Explorer double-click on Setup.exe in the temporary directory and follow the directions to install the utility. Using Diskeeper Lite Diskeeper Lite does what it claims to, but don't expect a lot of bells and whistles. The easy-to-use interface, shown in Figure A, presents two options: Analyze and Defragment. Diskeeper Lite defrags only one disk at a time, and each must be manually selected. Defragmentation can take from a minute to over an hour per disk, depending on the size of the drive and the degree of fragmentation.

Figure A: You can analyze and defrag your NT hard disk with Diskeeper Lite

The right pane of the utility's window displays a representative map of the drive. Color-coding distinguishes different areas of the drive, including fragmented and contiguous files, directories, the page file, and free space. The number of clusters per row decreases as you enlarge the window. You can watch the disk map while the utility runs, but it will always be too compressed for meaningful interpretation.

After analyzing Drive C on our test system, as shown in Figure A, Diskeeper Lite reported 173 fragmented files with 251 extra fragments and correctly characterized this disk as mildly fragmented. To start defragmentation, click on the Defragment icon under the appropriate drive and watch the animated graphic in the right windowpane. Complete defragmentation took less than five minutes. Although you can run other tasks while Diskeeper Lite is defragging your disk, the program runs as a high-priority task, significantly reducing overall system response. Paging file defragmentation The Windows NT paging file is created and managed exclusively by NT for its own use. Because NT expects data placed in the paging file to remain in the same physical location, attempting to defragment the paging file would crash the operating system. If your system has the right configuration, however, you can defragment your paging file safely. You'll need at least two separate logical drives, although they can be located on the same physical disk. And the drive that doesn't currently hold your paging file must have enough free space to hold one.

Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties from the resulting shortcut menu to open the System Properties window. Now, click on the Performance tab. In the Virtual Memory section of the property sheet, click the Change... button.

When the Virtual Memory window appears, note the location, initial size, and maximum size for the page file. In the example in Figure B, the paging file is on Drive C with a minimum size of 139MB and a maximum size of 189MB.

Figure B: Utilize the Virtual Memory window to view paging file information

Now you need to create an identical but temporary paging file on another disk. Select an available drive in the Drive field, (we selected Drive D for our example), enter the paging file sizes noted previously in the text boxes, and click the Set button. Then remove the original page file, on C in this example, by selecting C in the Drive field and entering 0 in both the minimum and maximum size text boxes. Then, click the Set button.

The system may open a dialog box to warn you that the file is too small to contain debugging information. Just click OK to close the warning, click OK to close the Virtual Memory window, and click Close to close the System Properties window. Finally, click Yes when prompted to restart your system.

When your system reboots, the paging file on the original drive will be gone. Now you can use Diskeeper Lite to defragment this drive. When the defragmentation is complete, use the same procedure described previously to recreate the paging file on the original drive. Remember to delete the temporary paging file. Restart your system to use the new paging file on your newly defragmented drive. The final result is shown in Figure C.

Figure C: Analyze your hard disk after defragmentation to see the improvements.

Safety first Although defragmenting tools are designed to be as safe as possible--including surviving a power loss while operating--it's just common sense to back up your data before you run any utility designed to rearrange your hard disk. As with most maintenance chores, defragging takes the longest the first time you do it. However, once your disk is whipped back into shape, you'll need to spend just a few minutes defragging it per week to keep your system running at top performance.