At 02:46 PM 16/05/2010, maccrawj wrote:
No because just as back then I know of no benchmark that will
exhaustively read all files to determine access times. It's not
going to affect creating a new file & reading it back unless the
drive is so fragmented that 1000's of non-contiguous clusters get
created by the test. Reading all the files before & after is the
only real test AFAIK and I've not done that.
For the heck of it, I did some testing with boot times on computers
before and after MyDefrag (run 6 month script.)
Older machine 1 (XP):
Boot time (from pressing power button until My Computer opens)
Before MyDefrag: 49 seconds
After MyDefrag: 32 seconds - 34% improvement
Older machine 2 (Vista):
Before MyDefrag: 1:49
After MyDefrag: 1:17 - 29% improvement
Brand new machine (XP):
Before MyDefrag: 1:10
After MyDefrag: 1:09
So I'm changing my original stance on defragging. With MyDefrag (I'm
not supporting any other defragger, since I have never seen
improvements with those) on an older machine, it's well worth running
MyDefrag at least once every few months to improve overall speed. On
a brand new machine, it's probably not worth the effort. I can't say
how often one would need to do a defrag, but I have a hard time
imagining more than once every 3 months, and probably no more than
once every 6 months.
T