Defraging 160GB Hard Drive

[tripodal]

I've just done some major dumping onto my fresh new 160GB Maxtor, and am curious what type of utility I'll need to defrag it since windows defrag freaks out. (cant be sure of what its doing really, seems to work but gives inaccurate display)

Can anyone reccomend a program with defrag/scandisk support beyond 137GB hard drives in windows?

Thanks
Allen

[KMS]

hi tripodal, i didnt realise there was a problem with defragging large drives, could quite easily be wrong though :D where did you get the 137gb limit from. Have you tried letting defrag run overnight ? as 160gb will take a hell of a long time :) The indications never been that accurate anyway.

[BigBen]

Hi,
you could try this (http://www.executivesoftware.com/diskeeper/diskeeper.asp) might be useful



Regards

[tripodal]

Originally posted by KMS
hi tripodal, i didnt realise there was a problem with defragging large drives, could quite easily be wrong though :D where did you get the 137gb limit from. Have you tried letting defrag run overnight ? as 160gb will take a hell of a long time :) The indications never been that accurate anyway.


well i am weary of letting it run unattended... yes it would take a long arse time to run, but in the box (containng the hard drive) was a note saying that windows disk utilities will not work with this drive. well i tried it anyways... it seemed to be working. but i want to be better safe than sorry...
and the 137 limit is what i believed to be the current limit for HD size on most controllers. untill the new standard comes out in full force

[tripodal]

Diskkepper worked fantastic, in fact the 160gb hard drive was only slightly defragmented containing only 63 fragments... despite the 30gigs that have made thier new home there.... my 10 baracuda boot drive is another story .... 10,000 fragments
WFT... i ran windows defragger on this a week ago... im think im sold
thanks for the link...
i am still a little skeptical... it shows a huge portion of my 160 as "reserved system space" im not completly convinced its recognizing the entire drive... anyone have any specifics on this?

[htwild1]

i also have the same drive. it showed 152 gig out of 160.
i partitioned in half and used diskeeper for defrag.
i guess the bigger the drive the more it needs for reserve.

[tripodal]

152 out of 160 is the result of two things

A.) the hard drive was never actually 160 Gigabytes... it was 160 billion byes.. the difference being a billion is 1,000,000,000 (duh)
and a gigabyte is 1073741824 (2 to the 30th power)
reasoning being that you can "mislabel" a drive, using the other standard having it appear bigger... advertising

B.) the file allocation table takes up a bit of space on a drive this large and also must be taken into account

[KMS]

hiya glad you've sorted it, still not sure which windows utils it means, maybe only fdisk ??? if you were NTFS would be no problem i'm sure, wheres sptw when you need him :D

The missing bit of your drive is due to drive slack, unavoidable though can be changed by your choice of cluster size & reduced by adding partitions.

[tripodal]

i am using ntfs.. i plan on getting 3 more of these and creating a massive spanned drive for all my mpgs, mp3s

[Sech]

just curious...just how long does it take to defrag a 160 meg had...I have a 40 gig raid 0 array and also a 40 gig storage drive...takes forever to defrag those......


Sech....

[sptw]

wheres sptw when you need him ?

:xsleep: :xsleep: :xsleep: :eek: :eek: What's happen?, :eek: What's happen?

:) well, ha, hummm, ha, yes you're right tripodal, storage devices are marketed and sold in terms of decimal (base 10) capacity. In decimal terms, one Gigabyte (GB) is equal to one billion bytes, but PC don't understand decimal base :D
The 137-gigabyte barrier is the result of the original design specification for the ATA interface that provided only 28 bits of address for data. This specification means a hard disk can have a maximum of 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes of data which puts the ATA interface maximum at 137.4 gigabytes.A new ATA standard, ATA/ATAPI-6, has been in the market now, and the latest draft of this standard resolves this issue by increasing the maximum number of bits used for addressing from 28 to 48. This solution increases the maximum capacity of an ATA device to 144 petabytes while maintaining compatibility with current ATA products.This new 160 GB DiamondMax D540X uses a wider 48-bit data address versus the smaller 28-bit address. Without 48-bit address support provided by the BIOS of a motherboard or an add-in controller such as Promise's, drive capacity for the user would be limited to 137 GB or below.What else is involved?Well, effort is required from OS vendors to increase storage device addressing up to 48 bits or more.The BIOS companies will also have to perform some work to recognize the increased capacity of the devices attached to the bus and allow the extended 48-bit commands to pass on to the devices. Boot partitions will also be an issue for the capacity of the drive if the BIOS does not recognize the 48-bit addressing scheme at or before the system boots the OS from the hard drive.There's a problem with OS's too, because many of today's operating systems are based on 32-bit addressing. These operating systems include many flavors of Linux, Mac OS 9.x, and Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, and XP (Windows XP/64-bit also has the limit because of leveraged 32-bit code).There's an article on Microsoft that describes the Windows XP 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) support for ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) disk drives that can enable the capacity of your hard disk to exceed the current 137 gigabyte (GB) limit. This patch will also be included in WindowsXP SP1 which will be available in the future.Here is the article : http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q303/0/13.ASP
Unfortunately i can't access this article.wheres M$ when we need them?

[tripodal]

wow, thanks. couldnt have asked for a more complete explaniation... i do have a question... why wouldnt they just make a move to 64bit addressing? as the next generation of processors wouldseem to fit in nicely in such a way

[Gibbon]

This is why sptw is a hard disk mod, cos he knows his stuff and then some! Nice one sptw m8 ;)

Oh yeah and 160Mb Hard drives? What are you storing? Maps of the entire galaxy??? :eek:

I still haven't filled my 20 Gig hard drive, lmao :D

Gibbon

[tripodal]

lets see here... i have about 8000 mp3's and then there are star trek episodes... and south park... and transformers... the list goes on and on... i only have 45 gb free :(

[Gibbon]

Only :rolleyes:

[tripodal]

40 gb free now :)

[Player0]

On that note, i just (finally) ordered my WD1000BB-SE drives, 200g total in raid-0...ill have about 160g free after i copy over from my current 40g array ;)

[tripodal]

oh no! im gonna have to order another 160gb... just so i can have the most.... i wonder tho, can you run 2 160gb's in raid 0?

[Player0]

Sure ya can...I mean...I dont know of any reasons why not :)

[tripodal]

just never seen it done is all :) will be interested in seeing how windows deals with a 200gb hard drive probably the same as a 160 but its still pushing the limit

[Player0]

Yeah...im a bit concerned about that as well...fdisk is right out for sure ;) I think ill let WinXP see what it can do with the partitions.

Ill let ya know in a week :)

[tripodal]

thanks