Topic: Hdd Fragmentation... Where Are The Defragmenters? (Read 506 times)

SigTom · « **Reply #45 on:** December 09, 2004, 09:55:00 AM »

It may be wanted, but like I said, I dont think its needed. No noticeable slowdown on Halo loading from the same HDD over 20 months old. Use the same Xbox to play at least 20+ episodes/week of different TV shows, FTPing them on and off repeatedly for at least the past 10 months, along with my music collection, which isnt the largest, but still 200+ songs is a good amount. If it were such an issue, dont you think this HDD would show some effect of fragementation? Wouldnt at least one of the numerous games I play show some slowdown? Only about 10 or so games I play on montly basis and I havent been able to tell a difference on any of them.

Since your already half way there, a hardware junkie, make the leap to software an get a coding. Take the same energy you spend into learning and keeping up to date with hardware, and apply some of it to software. You could even collaborate with at least one or 2 others in this thread, if not more of the numerous people who have demanded it. There HAS to be enought brain power between enough of you who want it to do it, right?

Mage · « **Reply #46 on:** December 10, 2004, 04:17:00 PM »

xgpu · « **Reply #47 on:** December 10, 2004, 07:14:00 PM »

Well ok..since I'm not a programmer and, do not understand the FATX file system...would it be possible to just transfer my C,E,F and G directory onto my pc, reformat the xbox hard drive and then transfer back over? or, would those files I just transferred to the PC already be fragmented thus, making it a useless idea?

I disagree with those who believe it does not matter (having a defrag tool or not) as, the more fragmented a drive gets, the harder your HD has to look for it which, (as far as PC goes) is actually harder on your hard drive and causes more grinding noise. Which, over time...is bad for your HD and, can decrease the longevity of it.

Mage · « **Reply #48 on:** December 14, 2004, 04:24:00 PM »

65C816 · « **Reply #49 on:** December 14, 2004, 11:27:00 PM »

You know the place to start would be a tool to retrieve file information on where the data really is. Forinstance, say you have BGM.AFS which you stream music from. This is not something to haev horribly fragmented. So it'd be nice to be able to select the file in a program and get details and have it tell you how many fragments make up the file. Atleast then you could really see if your important files are fragmented. I for one don't think it'd that big of an issue except on streaming data.

I don't have an upgraded HD, not that I wouldn't want one. But I have a DVD writer and prefer optical backups rather than magnetism because HDs are doomed to fail after a good amount of use. Optical discs ussually last much longer. Longer load times perhaps, but hey, I'm in no hurry, I can spare a few minutes.

ub2slw · « **Reply #50 on:** December 16, 2004, 04:32:00 PM »

Mage · « **Reply #51 on:** December 17, 2004, 05:28:00 AM »

Kthulu · « **Reply #52 on:** December 22, 2004, 05:02:00 PM »

is it needed? only if you've painted yourself into a corner. you should be able to backup your apps to your PC and format the xhdd. then move your apps back over. no room to backup your games and movies to your PC? well, you should have the originals on cd/dvd somewhere. piracy is bad right?

but let's say for whatever reason you don't have the original discs and need to backup your games and movies to your PC too...but you have a 300gb xhdd full of games and movies and a 120gb hdd in your PC. that is what i call painting yourself into a corner. why did you put the bigger hdd in your xbox to begin with? that is stupid. why is it stupid? um, fragmentation and backups...the problems you are facing. of course, if you go buy another 300gb drive to stick in your PC and use it for backing up your xbox, but damn, will you buy me one too, daddy warbucks?

every partition on the xbox (except C) should be treated as a cache drive, not an archive. if you want to archive 100s of gbs of data you should do it on the PC where there is better support for such things. of course, i know my logic on this is circular. as soon as someone develops an xbox defragger, you will be somewhat justified in this insane practice. i know i've upset alot people with the 'stupid' word. i do stupid things too, but i don't expect someone else to save me from the mistakes of my stupidity. i correct the matters myself. who in there right mind would dig a pond in the desert and then get mad because the people in the nearby town didn't make the rain happen to fill it up with water? let the flaming begin!

here's something to waste time pondering. which would take longer:
1. a defragger running on xbox with 300gb hdd 80% full
2. backing up those files to PC, formatting xbox hdd, putting files back

Kthulu · « **Reply #53 on:** December 22, 2004, 05:19:00 PM »

but of course it would be great to have one (as long as it didn't have bugs)

The_Truth · « **Reply #54 on:** December 29, 2004, 07:20:00 PM »

enderandrew · « **Reply #55 on:** March 14, 2005, 09:32:00 PM »

I've seen benchmarks of 3 game installs, and game loads that showed a new ATA133 80-pin cable didn't improve performance in the least.

And I'm pretty sure XBox is simply ATA33. I wonder if ATA66 or higher modes could be unlocked with a BIOS, but I don't think so.

jakejm79 · « **Reply #56 on:** November 27, 2006, 04:40:00 PM »

I know this is an old thread but I came across it after suspecting my hard drive being slow espically during FTP sessions. From what I have read (and please correct me if I am wrong, I could be way off base). The xbox will only writes one thing at a time (versus a PC where you can have mutiple programs all right to the HDD at the same time) and it should also write files in a logical order, starting at the beginning of the drive and moving forward, now my question is if you delete data from the start of your drive, next time you write to it will it use that free space, or the the "virgin" free space at the end of the last data written. If it is the later you should need to defrag at all until you have copied enuf data to fill the HDD. If it is the first, how smart is the FATX file system, will it try to squeeze a file in to a space that doesnt fit and have it get fragmented or will it look for free space elsewhere then come back and fill the space with a smaller file that fits. On another note maybe programmers should conside making a self defragging filesystem, i.e when you delete data at the beginning of the drive it shuffles everything down, to use a previously used illustration:

AAABBBBCCCCC.........

Delete AAA and write DDDDDD

instead of getting DDDBBBBCCCCCDDD...... you would get BBBBCCCCCDDDDDD

I know that wouldnt work in an environment where you delete and write a lot of small pieces of data frquently you could end up moving GBs worth of data just for removing a Kbytes. I think this would have more use for consumer electronics, i.e. xbox, DVRs etc. Anyways Im sure this idea flawed or it would have been done by now.

torne · « **Reply #57 on:** November 30, 2006, 03:47:00 AM »

QUOTE(jakejm79 @ Nov 27 2006, 11:47 PM)

If it is the first, how smart is the FATX file system, will it try to squeeze a file in to a space that doesnt fit and have it get fragmented or will it look for free space elsewhere then come back and fill the space with a smaller file that fits.

All FAT implementations in the real world, including the Xbox's FATX, nice though it would be for them to do something more intelligent, basically just pick the earliest available free space on the disk every time they need to allocate a block, which leads automatically to large amounts of fragmentation on any disk where blocks are allocated and freed frequently. So, yes, it really is that dumb.

QUOTE

On another note maybe programmers should conside making a self defragging filesystem, i.e when you delete data at the beginning of the drive it shuffles everything down, to use a previously used illustration:
AAABBBBCCCCC.........

Delete AAA and write DDDDDD
instead of getting DDDBBBBCCCCCDDD...... you would get BBBBCCCCCDDDDDD

I know that wouldnt work in an environment where you delete and write a lot of small pieces of data frquently you could end up moving GBs worth of data just for removing a Kbytes. I think this would have more use for consumer electronics, i.e. xbox, DVRs etc. Anyways Im sure this idea flawed or it would have been done by now.

This would be earth-shatteringly slow and also pose crash-recovery problems. The Xbox as it comes at retail doesn't really need any special consideration given to fragmentation given that the only data that gets rewritten is TDATA/UDATA, which usually contain small files that are not performance critical (namely, savegames). DVRs tend to use preallocating filesystems which find free spaces large enough to store the entire file they are about to record when possible.

Many filesystems used on UNIX systems don't suffer from fragmentation in any meaningful way - ext2/3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs are all relatively unaffected. They use various clever techniques to ensure this which you can read about if you Google, I'm too lazy to explain in any detail.

Disappointingly, NTFS, despite being a modern sensible filesystem from many points of view (arbitrary metadata streams, ACLs, transparent compression/encryption, properly journalled for crash recovery, etc) suffers quite badly from fragmentation as well, as it also tends to make exceptionally stupid decisions about where to allocate new blocks.

torne · « **Reply #58 on:** December 01, 2006, 05:09:00 AM »

QUOTE(hargle @ Nov 30 2006, 03:47 PM)

Is defragging really that much of a deal anymore? I totally understood its use back in the MFM hard drive days when seek times were incredibly slow, but today's uber ninja fast hard drives (not that the xbox really has such a device) have seek times that are incredibly fast.

Sure accesses will be faster, but what's the difference in human time-frame by reducing seek times from 17ms down to 8ms? I think I can wait, but then I'm old and slow myself.

Ah, but modern hard disks tend to have very large caches which prefetch sectors when there's nothing else to do - if you read sector X, the cache is likely to end up holding sectors X+1, X+2, X+3 etc as well. If this all represents contiguous parts of the same file (no fragmentation) then this is likely to be useful, as there's a good chance that the next part of that file will be read next. However, if the disk is heavily fragmented most of this data is useless and will not be used.

Reading data from the cache can be a good four times faster than reading from the disk, even totally discounting seek times and assuming the head is always in the correct position - the cache can effectively push out data at whatever the speed of the interface is.

The same effect repeats itself at a higher level - the OS's buffer cache is also likely to readahead in files which look like they are being accessed linearly, and this is much faster if the data is contiguous.

So, yah. Seek times for reading one sector are not very interesting from a fragmentation POV - it's the overall effect of the system that you have to look at. You rarely access the disk just to read one sector, after all

Author Topic: Hdd Fragmentation... Where Are The Defragmenters? (Read 506 times)