On Sunday 17 October 2004 07:53 pm, David Gillett wrote:
>   While scan time goes up linearly with drive size (but comes back down
> with enhancements in drive speed), a significant part of defrag time is
> time spent writing a copy of data to a different drive location.  This is
> minimized if the program can work out how to write the data once only, to
> its final defragged location.
>   As a drive gets full, it becomes harder and harder and ultimately
> impossible to do that -- it becomes necessary to write data blocks to
> temporary locations from which they will have to be moved *again* to
> complete the process (sometimes more than once!).
>   So, all ales being equal, a drive that is nearer to being full can take
> longer to defrag than one with more free space.
>
>   It will also generally take more work to defrag a drive, the more
> activity has occurred since it was last done.  For most people this is
> proporational to time that has gone by, although not at the same rate for
> all users.
>
> Dave Gillett


Dave:
An add-on to your comments: There is a setting in the Win98SE defrag utility
for optimizing startup time (or similar). The idea was that the most
frequently used programs should be given preferential placement on the drive.
However, I found that deselecting this option _greatly_ reduced defrag time
so that defragging was a relatively trivial task, and I did not notice any
discernible change in system performance.

Regards,
Carroll Grigsby

             PCSOFT maintains many useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml