schur@venera.isi.edu (Sean Schur) (06/12/90)
Does anyone know of any utilities to speed up hard disks. In other words to de-fragment the hard disk. I would prefer something public domain. But if you know of anything commercial let me know. ============================================================================== \ / \ \ / / Sean Schur \ \ / / \ \/ / USENET: schur@isi.edu \ /a\mpyr/ Compuserve: 70731,1102 \/ \ / ideo Plink: OSS259 \/ ==============================================================================
wizard@sosaria.imp.com (Chris Brand) (06/14/90)
In article <13884@venera.isi.edu> schur@venera.isi.edu (Sean Schur) says: > Does anyone know of any utilities to speed up hard disks. In other words > to de-fragment the hard disk. I would prefer something public domain. But > if you know of anything commercial let me know. BAD comes to mind. However, when it comes to safety, speed, efficiency and such there are worlds between BAD and PC based products like PCTools Compress 5.5 or Norton SpeedDisk. It's slow, eats LOTS of memory and is not 100% stable. And if you get a crash while BAD is working prepare to re-format your HD and restore your backup... -- ------------------------------------ Chris Brand - wizard@sosaria.imp.com "Justice is the possession and doing of what one is entitled to" - Platon ------------------------------------
bscott@nyx.UUCP (Ben Scott) (06/17/90)
In article <4818.AA4818@sosaria> wizard@sosaria.imp.com (Chris Brand) writes: >In article <13884@venera.isi.edu> schur@venera.isi.edu (Sean Schur) says: >> Does anyone know of any utilities to speed up hard disks. In other words >> to de-fragment the hard disk. I would prefer something public domain. But >> if you know of anything commercial let me know. > >BAD comes to mind. However, when it comes to safety, speed, efficiency and >such there are worlds between BAD and PC based products like PCTools >Compress 5.5 or Norton SpeedDisk. Very few of the PC optimizers actually do all that B.A.D. does. I have asked the author about this and he said that most of them just seem to re-organize the directories. B.A.D. physically moves the whole file, all of them, to a more compact configuration. Neither of us can see a way to do this in the 5 minutes or so most PC disk optimizers manage to do their job. As for safety, I've never had a problem with B.A.D. (and I'm a beta-tester too...) Well, only one semi-problem and it didn't affect the disk - whenever I was running Blitzdisk and BAD-ing a floppy, BAD would crash on exit. The disk was not hurt, though, and it was just an interaction between a disk-cache program (any type) and a program like B.A.D. that operates at the lowest levels of the disk structure. >It's slow, eats LOTS of memory and is not 100% stable. And if you get a >crash while BAD is working prepare to re-format your HD and restore your >backup... 26K per meg of your partition is required during the run, and the upcoming (yes, still upcoming...) B.A.D. 4.0 has virtual memory routines that enable it to use free space on the HD when memory is unavailable. You do, of course, need to have one or the other... And if you can think of ANY way to be able to recover a drive while ANY disk optimizer is in the middle of it's job, please tell me! There's no way it can keep the disk structure preserved while actually moving files around. BAD does not GURU itself (at least I've never seen it, and I run the support BBS so I see all bug reports too and no one has mentioned a problem). OK, so I'm not the most unbiased person - but I can say that I liked and used B.A.D. long before I met the author or knew about Arvada 68K (the support board). It does wonders for floopies or hard drives, and is a very solid product. . <<<<Infinite K>>>> .---------------------------------------------------------------------------. |Ben Scott, professional goof-off and consultant at The Raster Image, Denver| |Amiga UUCP node: ...!uunet!isis!nyx!orac!bscott Else: bscott@nyx.cs.du.edu| |FIDO point address 1:104/421.2, or call the Arvada 68K BBS at (303)424-9831| |"Don't embarrass us..." "Have I ever?" - Buckaroo Banzai | *AMIGA POWER* | `---------------------------------------------------------------------------'