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[Zetrox]

Hey people, I was just curious about one thing...

I, like many of you, keep moving around files, adding new files, erasing files, etc..., constantly from my Xbox's hard drive, and have realised that performance over time has become a bit sluggish at times.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that a disk defragmentation utility for the Xbox does not exist.  Now I'm not sure if there are any technical limitations associated with the FATX file system thats preventing such a release, but I'm sure there are many benefits to be made from such a release.

Please provide some feedback on this matter, as I'm sure one of you developers might be interested on such a project.

Zetrox
[email protected]

[fretster]

i know i for one would definatly use a defragmenter if it came out for the xbox

[Heet]

The level of difficulty is what is keeping this from happening.  You dont want a defrag with bugs mang.

[AE6689]

This has been talked about in the avalaunch forums. (here) So there is a problem in doing this since the xbox does not have enough memory.  The only way would be to use X, Y, and Z drives for virtual memory or to do it over a network and use your computers memory.  Either way if someone could figure this out I would give them a BIG hug  and thank them every time I used my xbox.  So I would like to see one if someone could make a workaround for the amount of memory the xbox has.

[the joker]

team ava still working on it.  got started again a week ago or so

[Heet]

ewwwww.  Good news              

[bradfordjohnson]

If you really want to do this now, you could just FTP everything off of your drive to your PC, defrag (to be safe),  then back over.  The only limitation here is the size of your PC's hard drive to the XBox drive.   I for one can do this...but a program on the xbox would be nice.  :lol:  

[luther349]

the xbox has plenty of memery for a defrage program lol hell thers been defragmenters sence 386 days lol the good old dos command of defrage c: lol.

so xbox memery isnt a issue but rather the fatx file system take time to figure out and make a defragmenter.

[bobdavis]

QUOTE (luther349 @ Apr 30 2004, 10:31 PM)

the xbox has plenty of memery for a defrage program lol hell thers been defragmenters sence 386 days lol the good old dos command of defrage c: lol. so xbox memery isnt a issue but rather the fatx file system take time to figure out and make a defragmenter.

Your logic is flawed. 386's didn't have 100-200GB hard drives in them. Tens of megabytes takes much less memory to map than modern-day hard drives. The memory limitation on the Xbox is the problem nowadays.

Also, bradfordjohnson, I assume you meant "format" just to be safe. You would want to clean off the Xbox drive totally before reloading all of the data. Transferring it to your computer, defragging it there, then transferring it back to the Xbox would do nothing.

[razorrifh]

QUOTE (bobdavis @ May 3 2004, 03:38 PM)

Tens of megabytes takes much less memory to map than modern-day hard drives. The memory limitation on the Xbox is the problem nowadays.

unless i just completely dont understand defragmentation, memory isnt a big limitation. you could defrag it in sections, so it may not guarantee that f:\a.txt is physically next to f:\b.txt but it would guarantee that those individual files would not be slit up.  

[d0wnlab]

if you watch an old DOS defragmenter work, it doesn't swap very much to RAM.  it works from the start of the disk to the end, and every time it hits a sector (might be wrong terminology, not sure) that's not in the right place, it moves it to a free sectore somewhere else on disk.  It replaces it with the proper sector.  There's some optimization in trying to order chunks that get moved and the such, but THAT is how deframentation works regardless of memory.

note, I never said it was fast..

[BetaOne]

You kids R silly.  It depends upon what kind of system we are talking about here.  If you are talking about a standard over-the-counter xbox then you are talking a 9gig drive with 32mb of memory.  32 Mb of memory is plenty of room to defragment a drive.  Seeing that you can set up 128k streams, it would not be that big of a deal to defragment the drive.  The whole argument that 32MB is not enough memory... BAH... hogwash... the flawed response to the person who said the whole 386 thing was flawed... has a flaw...

:lol:

You see... 386 systems didn't have much memory... as a matter of fact, I remember having a 386 with a 300MB drive.  My 386 had a Whole whopping 2MB of RAM... and I defrag'd my drive no problem.  Now, you also forget extended memory issues in the old days... remember reaching past the 512k (or was it 1MB...beeen a LONG time ago) limitation?  We didn't, and most programs didn't have access to large chunks of memory.

So, you can bet that a 300MB drive was being defragged in less than 512k memory.

Now for the fun part...

<_<

You see... you don't defrag a drive in MEMORY... you defrag a drive in a "virtual partition" you create.  That is why most defrager software utilities now days require "X" amount of free disk space... they copy data sector by sector to their "virtual" drive... then they clean up that section of the drive... then they copy back those things that will fit back on the clean section... and repeat process.

The only memory being used is to organize sectors... and that can be done in a variable amount depending upon how much time and free memory you have available.  If you are using a standard non-dev system with 32 MB of memory (minus about 2-3mb for overhead) you will end up with about 28mb available to your program.  This is 28MB chunks of data to play around with... out of 9gig... that is around 322 chunks... of course it isn't really calculated like that... but the idea is..

You got plenty of memory... because you got the HARDDRIVE... you know paging to disk?


Good fun....







Now, if we are talking development

[triggernum5]

There is source code available for ext2fs and minix defraggers.  Might shed some light on the issue

[dankydoo]

QUOTE

You kids R silly.

No you are silly.

QUOTE

If you are talking about a standard over-the-counter xbox then you are talking a 9gig drive with 32mb of memory.

The standard over the counter xbox has either an 8 or 10 GB HDD and 64 MB of RAM.

Also, Im not sure exactly how a defragger works, or what kind of memory footprint it leaves, but with the xbox, there is no demand paging out of the box.  Only recently have some highly skilled coders knocked up custom paging libraries.  Does FBAXX have these routines?  I can't remember, but I know that at least one of the arcade emulators does.  If I remember correctly, the guys at avalaunch were working on this.  I can understand why they would take their time because once you start messing with the file system, things can get really messy really fast.  People ask for this tool, but as soon as someone loses all of their data, the person that made the tool would be crucified.

dankydoo

This post has been edited by dankydoo: Jun 10 2004, 04:29 PM

[Sauron-Jin]

dankydoo, please, don't talk about defrag if you don't know how it works, the truth is that if you can actually use a harddrive in a system, then the system is capable of defrag that harddrive, faster or slower, but capable. I will not enter into details, but this is TRUE. To write a program to do this is another story  

If Team AVA or someone else has not released a defrag utility yet, i suppose it is because it must requiere knowledge of how FatX filesystem works or something like that, and this project will not be much trial-error friendly  

My vote is for "YES", A program like this would be really welcome and useful for me.