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The graphs below represent a performance comparison
between a badly fragmented disk and the same disk optimized.
Testing was done on a 500MB partition on a 9500/200 with OS
8.1 installed. Virtual Memory was set to 1MB over installed
RAM.
Drive before optimization:
Allocation of free space
Allocation of files
Allocation of free space and files after optimization with
Speed Disk
The Results:
These results are stopwatch tests and represent
the performance difference in percentage of time taken to
carry out a given task. Shorter bars equals better
performance.
For the test below a folder totalling 65MB in size and containing
1,000 files were duplicated
For the test below a folder totalling 65MB in size and containing
1,000 files was deleted from the trash
The tests results below are from the benchmark program Speedometer
4.0. Longer bars equal better performance
Note: Optimization appears from these results to give you
a modest performance gain . We used a 500MB partition for
our test and it might be the case that the performance improvement
would be greater on a lager sized drive that was badly fragmented.Unexplained
is the poor performance of the optimized drive compared to
the fragmented drive when copying the test folder. Aside from
performance there are other good reasons to keep a tidy drive.
MacSpeedZone welcomes your comments
on these results.
Commentary:
The logical reason a duplicate might be faster
on a fragmented drive is that the System wouldn't have to
always go to the end of the drive to write the new data. In
many cases, particularly with smaller files, it would find
an open area on the disk nearby, avoiding the slow process
of moving the head back and forth from one end of the platter
(read) to the other (write) on the disk platter. Faster drives
would make this less significant, and depending on how full
the drive is, the difference in distance would change too.
Bill Patterson
BillPatt@iadfw.net
External Links
- MacTips
tackles fragmentation in an informative article (tip #32)
- Symantec - makers
of Norton Utilities which contains Speed Disk a disk optimization
program
- Alsoft - makers
of DiskExpress Pro a disk optimization program
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