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I believe I understand the basic concepts of fragmentation of data on hard-drives, and the concept of defragmentation to counter the effects of this. What I don't really understand is how one actually measures the performance gain by defragmenting files.
Some say the system reacts "snappier" or that things load faster after running a defragmentation. I don't feel this is always the case. I've run defrag many times on different pcs without noticing any noticeable performance gain at all.
So I'm wondering, is there any way to actually measure how much performance difference is before / after a defragmentation, and what the ACTUAL impact on the systems performance is?
**Update:**What I'm looking for is a tool that can give me some concrete indication of overall system performance improvements. Is this achieved best through benchmarking tools specific to HDD access speeds? Or will gain the best result through an application like File Access Timer from Raxo? Also I'm running windows XP
I think you meant "Excerpt from the readme"... – RBerteig – 2009-07-28T23:01:04.600
This is a small and tool that measures file access times on specific areas on my hdd, and actually does give me what I'm asking for. But it does also demand that I manually set up the scan to the parts I want to measure. Thanks, I'm still interested in more advanced features though :) – pavsaund – 2009-07-29T07:21:36.067
I gave this the time to make several runs, and it showed some gain on access times on files. But is time-consuming, and doesn't show any status...pretty clueless as to how far along it has come – pavsaund – 2009-08-03T19:57:49.747
For this particular Q, theres doesn't seem to be other good answers, so I'm accepting this for now. Though I may follow @Michael Kohne's suggestion – pavsaund – 2009-08-03T19:59:41.783