Diskeeper is planning to introduce an innovative approach to disk defragmentation that may be of interest to readers of this forum.


Quote:

Diskeeper plans to introduce a file system filter driver later this year that will eliminate most file fragmentation before it actually occurs, company executives said Friday. ... But the filter driver is designed to weed out about 75 percent of fragmentation before it ever occurs, by intercepting the data before it is written to the file system, and organizing it appropriately. ... Materie said the technology was currently working through extensive testing, both to minimize the impact on CPU and memory performance, as well as file-system stability. On the latter metric, Materie said Diskeeper has found no problems. "It's absolutely bulletproof from a stability perspective," he said.

Source:  Diskeeper Tech to Prevent Fragmented Files

Before it occurs. Novel concept. Why didn't I think of that?

Impact on CPU is the big question. They give no inkling? Sounds like it will activate every time data is written to disk.

If it increases latency of I/O operations at all, it would be completely self-defeating.  People defragment their disk in order to make disk reads faster... so if this slows it down, then what is the point?

I'll be interested to see some benchmarks.

A better solution would be the new file system MS promised in Vista and still hasn't delivered.