PerfectDisk Blog from Raxco.com| Defrag Software

Shine up Chrome with PerfectDisk

                         

Google's Chrome web browser has crossed the 1% market penetration threshold (1.15% according to Wikipedia), which may sound small, but when taken in light of the number of web users around the world, still adds up to a significant number -- over 10 million.

                                      

One of the things we've noticed here, along with many of our PerfectDisk users, is that Chrome creates a LOT of temporary internet files (or Chrome cache files) -- more than IE, Firefox and others. Cache files grow incrementally, resulting in heavy fragmentation when these files are deleted, and there can be thousands of such files depending on the size of your cache. This results in slower PC performance and slower startup performance.

               

PerfectDisk has found a home with many Chrome users. You too can put a shine on your Chrome browsing with PerfectDisk.

Defrag Chrome.

From WoW to Club Penguin -- MMORPG for the family

                        

Move over World of Warcraft (WoW) players with your big MPQ files. The massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) market is getting more crowded with kid- and family-friendly games rather than evil characters. Hello Legos!

Yukari Iwatani Kane, writing in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, writes that "a wave of new multiplayer games targeted at families and children is about to hit the market." Defeat evil? How about speeding around a race track or becoming a master chef. Good bye World of Warcraft, hello Lightening McQueen and the World of Cars Online from Disney (debuting late summer). Kane writes that "by broadening audiences to children and younger teens, the industry hopes to more than double the market for online multiplayer games over the next 5 years." With Sony and Disney going into this big time, don't bet against it.

                      

Along with these games come big files, big updated files, deleted files, and heavily fragmented drives.

Defrag WoW and your MPQ files? Of course -- many of the 11.5 million players do that today.

Defrag your Pirates of the Caribbean and Club Penguin files for better performance? Yes, those too.

                  

Resize your partitions in Vista/Windows 7 -- a better way

                              

Many Vista (and Windows 7 Beta and Windows Server 2008) users are happy to have the ability to resize partitions with Microsoft's built-in Disk Manager. With this built-in tool, users have the ability to dynamically resize partitions. Of course, like many things built by Microsoft into the OS, there are third-party options available that provide more robust capabilities than Vista’s Disk Manager. While I would rarely if ever recommend using Windows’ built-in defragmenter (insert smile here!), I’ll concede that there are people using the built-in Disk Manager to resize partitions on their drives. With the tool, users can shrink a single partition with unused space, and then create a new partition in the resulting free space, as well as extend a current partition if there is available free space after it.

                    

Ah, but there’s a potential problem. Some users have lots of space but very little room to shrink. What to do? The real issue is that certain data is placed at the end of the disk or partition. But you want it at the front of the drive in order to repartition. You can accomplish this with PerfectDisk’s SMARTPlacement defrag (or Consolidate Free Space defrag). All your files will be moved to the front of the drive, clearing up your drive to be able to shrink it, and then you can resize your partitions.

Your partitions, but not magic. PerfectDisk -- defrag for your partitions. Smarter.

               

Hypervisors -- game on

                         

In the world of virtualization, there are several choices, but really a Big 3 fighting it out - ESX Server from VMware, Hyper-V from Microsoft, and XenServer from Citrix. Which one is best for a particular environment depends on various considerations, configurations and parameters. In a recent Optimize Now (IT newsletter from Raxco) by Erwin Solis, the differences between ESX and Hyper-V from a performance, usability, feature and cost perspective were explored.

                       

In the March cover story of Virtualization Review by Rick Vanover, the performance differences between ESX, Hyper-V and XenServer are investigated in a lab report. Vanover, an MCTS and MCSA, is a systems administrator for Safelite AutoGlass in Columbus, Ohio with a focus on virtualization, Windows-based server administration and system hardware. In his article, Hanover comes to the conclusion that there is no overall best hypervisor performer among these 3. Each may perform better in a particular environment. However, he states that "what is entirely clear is that all three hypervisors are legitimate virtualization platforms, and that no single company has a monopoly on virtualization any longer."

                       

Vanover writes in the Everyday Virtualization blog, and received a lot of feedback on his lab testing. It's like I try to always say when talking about testing we do or feedback we receive. For any user, they should be a starting point for making your own decisions. Rick was laying some key points out there, just as we try to do when talking about virtualization defrag or defragmentation in general.

Virtual Aware defrag makes sense to us and to a lot of ESX- and Hyper-V heavy businesses for reasons we've outlined in this space before. It may or may not make sense for your business.

But it's a place to start testing...and thinking.

She's back! Tanned, rested and ready...well, we hope rested

The PerfectDisk family here in Maryland, and we expect many around the world, are ecstatic to welcome back Susie Colon to the Technical Support team after a 3-month leave. Susie was busy caring for her new son. While she's been busy, had many a sleepless night, and likely will have many more sleepless nights, she's glad to be back and we're glad to have her back.

Welcome back, Susie!

                             

PerfectDisk 10 for Windows Home Server review

                   

Andrew Edney is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Home Server. Andrew is one of many MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) around the world who are PerfectDisk users. He is an experienced IT professional who has worked for Microsoft, HP and Fujitsu Services, and holds several industry certifications.                         

                          

Andrew runs the Using Windows Home Server blog, and in a recent post has a review of PerfectDisk 10 for Windows Home Server. He concludes his extensive review noting that PerfectDisk 10 for Windows Home Server "is a very easy to install and easy to use product that once you have installed you can pretty much just leave it there running in the background."

You can read the full review here.

 

The March Madness productivity issue -- maybe not so much in 2009

Every March, much of the United States gets wrapped up in what has become to be known as "March Madness," a 3-week tournament of college basketball teams vying for the national championships. For those of you outside the US, think of a lighter version of the World Cup. With all the interest, and also with many of the first-round games played during normal working hours, there is always a lot written and discussed here about lost productivity in the US work force. Last year, the estimates were close to $2 billion.

Many will debate the validity of those numbers. It really depends on the job. If one works an 8-hour day and spends an hour watching basketball and not doing his or her work, I'll agree that's lost productivity and not what the company has in mind when they hand the employee a paycheck. But if the employee is working 10 or 12 hours a day, including some from home or wherever in this non-stop work day many people have, then watching a little basketball for a break may actually be a good thing.

                                  

Indeed, Liz Wolgemuth, writing for US News and World Report, states that Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the firm that was most often quoted for lost productivity numbers, is looking at things differently this year. "In light of the fact that employers have more important things to worry about, we feel that any attempt to estimate the impact of March Madness on productivity would be counterproductive and inappropriate," said John Challenger in a statement. He even goes further to say that watching March Madness this year might be good for employee morale.

It can be the same thing for your defrag. If you have a report to get done today, or this week, you'll get it done one way or the other. If your drive is a mess with fragmented files and fragmented free space, you're not going to not get your report done. But if your drive is a mess, getting that report done is going take more time and be a lot more frustrating as you wait for the file system to put the pieces back together again.

So sit back, make sure you have PerfectDisk StealthPatrol or AutoPilot Scheduling defrag set up, and enjoy the games....

                            

With a perfectly defragmented drive.

Artificial? No. Smarter? Yes. Your MFT? Just fine, thank you

                      

I've written about this before, but since we still receive questions or comments on this topic, I'm doing so again as a review. Uses sometimes ask us why PerfectDisk does not change the size of the Master File Table (MFT). Other defragmenters do it and, hey, changing something seems pretty cool. Well, this is another area where we think PerfectDisk is a little smarter.

When an NTFS drive is formatted, it creates the $MFT, which contains a fixed number of records which can used. As files are created, these records are used. Eventually, the pre-allocated number of records is filled up and the $MFT needs to grow, adding another chunk of file records. Immediately adjacent to the $MFT, the MFT Reserved Zone is created. By default, the MFT Reserved Zone is 12.5% of the drive and goes from the first record of the MFT to the first non-free cluster after the last MFT record. If you have a 100GB drive, then the Reserved Zone is going to be 12.5GB - quite large! If you look in the Windows Explorer/Properties on a drive, the free space shown is the total of both INSIDE and OUTSIDE the Reserved Zone.

The MFT Reserved Zone is created specifically to allow the $MFT to grow in a contiguous fashion. When the $MFT fills up, it allocates the next chunk from the free space located in the MFT Reserved Zone. NTFS will avoid putting files inside the Reserved Zone unless you get into a low free space condition. It is not necessary to artificially pre-allocate additional space for the $MFT in order to keep it from growing fragmented. 

A smarter MFT means a smarter defrag.

                  

Yes, Virginia, PerfectDisk 10 Exchange will be Virtual Aware

                    

All Exchange users in favor?

We've had a lot of PerfectDisk 10 for Exchange users coming to us since the 10 launch and basically asking "Hey, where the heck is my Virtual Awareness for PerfectDisk 10 for Exchange?" Well, we knew there was lots of interest in Virtual Awareness prior to launch, and we anticipated increased interest post-launch. But in all honesty, it's gone beyond our expectations and one area where we knew early on we had missed was the Exchange side. Fortunately, because of our code base and architecture of PerfectDisk, getting from Point A (no Virtual Awareness for PD 10 Exchange) to Point B (PD 10 Exchange with Virtual Awareness) is pretty straightforward.

Thanks for all the feedback and getting on us on this one. We're on the case. PerfectDisk 10 Exchange with patent-pending Virtual Awareness will be here.

And I get to say it one last time, with a twist...it's a Perfect Ten (with even more Virtual Awareness). Coming real soon.

                  

Releated Post:

• PerfectDisk 10 Release
• PerfectDisk 10 Virtual Enterprise Edition Release

A defrag RFP for the home user

With the federal government about to get much larger, the biggest swarm of consultants, "Beltway Bandits" and the like are already starting to infiltrate the Washington, DC area, home of the US government and your favorite defrag company. They're looking for a piece of the stimulus pie and anything else that comes along. Contracts for government work are awarded via the RFP process, or Request For Proposal. In an RFP, an agency or company specifies the criteria on which they will make a decision for a particular product or solution.

Well, in case any home users want to play government agency and put together their own RFP, here's a list to help get you thinking:

• The defrag tool must be certified by Microsoft. When a hard drive fails, you want to eliminate possible sources of the problem.
• The defrag solution must run automatically in the background, using only idle resources.
• The defragmenter should provide the ability to regularly schedule defrag runs when automatic background defragmenting is not possible.
• The defrag tool should defrag a drive in a single pass, rather than slowly chipping away at the problem. Once and done.
• The defrag tool should provide multiple defrag and optimization strategies according to a user's specific and unique needs (e.g. being able to defragment a specific file or set of file).
• The defrag solution must consolidate free space into the largest piece of contiguous free space possible in order to reduce future fragmentation and minimize resource consumption.
• The defrag tool should defragment with less than 1% free space on the drive.
• The defragger should provide an automatic file recycler to recover space.
• The defragger should provide a duplicate file finder to save space.
• The defrag utility should provide a set of space reports and tools to analyze file and directory usage and allocation.
• The defrag tool should be able to defrag SSD drives effectively by consolidating free space and not require an extra-cost option to do so.
• The defrag tool should be the one most recommended by Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs).
• The defrag utility should support unlimited drive sizes without an extra fee. 

These are just a few things to think about as you do your own analysis and "RFP." As always, we recommend trying products side by side and seeing for yourself.

Do your own thing. Make your own decisions. And if you end up with a great defragger from a company that has the defrag solutions for the 21st century, you will have done yourself proud.

And aligned yourself with the US Patent and Trademark Office, FBI, National Institute of Health, and many other government agencies. As well as Gibson Guitars, Subway (the sandwich guys), Fosters (the wine and beer guys), Marvel (yea, Spiderman), and other cool companies.

You get it.