BIOS: Technology Means Business

With terabyte drives (a trillion bytes) now easily available and smaller drives selling for very little money, you can store a lot of stuff - practically everything. And file sizes are continuing to increase as well. Documents with embedded graphics, large presentations, scanned images, digital photos, MP3 music files and even whole TV shows and movies are now residing on hard drives. The vast quantities of these and their inordinate size present new challenges for computer performance and make defragmentation more critical than ever.

As disks have grown bigger and files have grown larger and more numerous, defragmentation is required more and more often to maintain a computer’s performance. While it used to be sufficient to defragment once a week, it eventually became necessary to defragment daily. Today, even daily defragmentation is not enough for small businesses - an hour’s production activity can seriously degrade performance.

File fragmentation on your hard disk occurs whenever you save or resave a file to a physical location on the disk that is simply too small to store the file data in a contiguous (uninterrupted) state. Defragmenting your hard disk is a procedure which unites all the disparate file fragments into proper contiguous files. The end result ideally is shorter file save times and shorter file loading times. The corollary to the end result is that your hard disk doesn’t have to work as hard to store or load files, due to the smaller the number of file pieces and the less time the hard disk has to spend searching for and storing or assembling everything. The effort put in by the operating system is correspondingly reduced as well - not as much work to do sorting out so many file pieces. Of course the chances of the operating system making a mistake on any of those individual file pieces is also reduced.

Diskeeper 2007 Professional Premier Edition (£71.97) represents a relatively major shift in the way you improve the performance and reliability of your computers. For over a decade Diskeeper has developed Windows system defragmentation technology, but Diskeeper 2007 takes a significant step forward. New (but experienced) users will find Diskeeper relatively easy to use, yet comprehensive in its capabilities, while experienced Diskeeper users will see major changes, yet still recognise familiar features, presented in a new, more streamlined way.

Diskeeper has made its reputation with the trademarked phrase ‘Set It and Forget It,’ meaning that once Diskeeper is installed, you can simply forget about it - defragmentation is taken care of automatically and your computer is kept at peak performance all the time. However, times have changed. Disk drives have grown huge. And, with the growth of disk drives has come an explosion in the size and number of files stored on disk drives. But scheduling a defragmenter to run every hour is scary to performance-conscious system administrators and computer users. Even with features like I/O Smart and selectable run priorities, they are reluctant to run a defragmenter in the middle of the workday.

Diskeeper’s new InvisiTasking technology uses a proprietary technique to carefully monitor resource consumption on a Windows computer system and inject Diskeeper processing into the unused portions - and only into the unused portions. Diskeeper claims that InvisiTasking is so good that it’s all but impossible to even detect whether the software is running, but we certainly heard our computer’s hard disk whirring away. Nevertheless, Diskeeper can run all the time. It never needs to back off or shut down to reduce overhead, since overhead is already virtually non-existent. This means no more need for scheduling defragmentation. In fact, scheduling defragmentation worsens performance by delaying the improvement that defragmentation brings.

The Dashboard tab in the Diskeeper display includes a real-time graph showing the idle resources on your computer, and the small portion of those unused idle resources used by Diskeeper with InvisiTasking (the graph also shows resources used when Diskeeper is run manually). Now, you may be sceptical at first and find it hard to believe InvisiTasking has virtually no impact on system overhead. For this reason, you can specify times when Diskeeper is prevented from running at all.

Introduced in Diskeeper 10, and refined in Diskeeper 2007, the second generation of Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology (I-FAAST) goes beyond ‘normal’ defragmentation to speed up your file access and creation times. Traditionally, a defragmenter like Diskeeper could restore the performance of a computer to like ‘new’ condition. I-FAAST, however, works to improve the computer’s performance to better than new. I-FAAST improves file access and creation by up to 80 per cent (average 10 to 20 per cent).

When I-FAAST is enabled, Diskeeper runs specially-engineered benchmarks on your disk volumes to learn their individual performance characteristics. Diskeeper then transparently monitors volumes for file access frequency on an ongoing basis to determine which files are requested most often. Special analysis techniques prevent Diskeeper from being ‘fooled’ by files that have been recently accessed. Diskeeper then sequences the files to take best advantage of both the logical characteristics and physical characteristics of the volume. The sequencing process is integrated with background defragmentation, so it’s virtually transparent to the user.

The I-FAAST 2.0 engines have also been refined to use InvisiTasking technology and to provide advanced online directory consolidation and improved boot optimisation. You can also now select specific files to be included in the I-FAAST processing. I-FAAST intelligence allows Diskeeper to adapt to changing situations - so if the demands on a given system change, Diskeeper automatically adjusts its behavior accordingly. The I-FAAST feature is included in Diskeeper EnterpriseServer, Diskeeper Server and Diskeeper Pro Premier editions. Terabyte Volume Engine 2.0 has also been enhanced to use the InvisiTasking technology, and to better consolidate free space. The TVE is available in Diskeeper EnterpriseServer.

Diskeeper has an entirely new approach to defragmenting when compared to what you may be accustomed to. Diskeeper was designed to allow you to automate background defragmentation without impacting the use of other programs. The Diskeeper console has been enhanced to reduce the number of steps necessary to perform typical tasks, and to improve the overall user experience. This includes a new, easy-to-use ‘timeline’ control for specifying the times when Automatic Defragmentation is turned on and off. The interface is a little overwhelming initially, but you’ll soon to get grips with all the settings and graphs.

A few select Diskeeper enterprise customers have received Diskeeper 2007 for Vista. The primary reason for the delayed release is due to subtle changes in the Master File Table (MFT). Diskeeper has addressed these but are being very cautious and says it is testing this heavily (bootime defragmentation). Microsoft also had to make a last minute fix to Vista (made in its RTM build) to address some issues that affected one of Diskeeper’s advanced features. Diskeeper says it should have a release for Vista available for download towards the end of this month. It will be a free update to everyone on maintenance and everyone who has purchased/upgraded to Diskeeper 2007.

General defrag performance is superior to the standard Windows tool, which isn’t surprising since it’s merely a cut-down of an older version of this software. We ran Diskeeper on a heavily fragmented volume, where it took just 15 minutes to tidy it up. We reinstated the volume from a disk image and watched the Windows tool take more than 30 minutes to complete the same task. I-FAAST is perhaps the most significant new feature, as projects, media files and games load faster. The improvement is measurable, and more important, noticeable. If you want increased disk performance and speed, install Diskeeper on all your systems. But if you’re overwhelmed by its features and price, there are cut-down Professional (£38.19) and Home editions (£15.25).

[9] - Editors' Choice

[Best System Utility Pricing UK]
[Best System Utility Pricing US]