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Pleonasm

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Diskeeper: HyperFast
Dec 7^th, 2008 at 9:27am

Readers of this forum may be interested in “the first ever solution designed specifically to optimize NAND Flash devices” - HyperFast:

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Most NAND Flash storage drives suffer from different symptoms. They do not experience the same file fragmentation read delays of traditional platter disks, except in extreme circumstances. Most NAND Flash does suffer write penalties that are exacerbated over time by badly fragmented free space.

The new Solid State Drives (SSDs) are based on NAND Flash technology and will degrade over time as free space gets chopped up across the device. You may have heard that you should not "defrag" Flash drives. This is largely true, given the traditional definition of defragmentation as "file defragmentation". That traditional approach would also create excess and unnecessary write activity on these devices (that does not return benefit as it would a HDD), potentially wearing them out faster.

The purpose of HyperFast is optimization of free space to keep file writes at peak "out of box" performance levels. Its design considers both performance and longevity, increasing both through intelligent organization of data on these drives. It addressed the needs of Flash drives without the negative excess of traditional file defragmenters.

While HyperFast can improve all portable Flash drives, like the common USB attached thumb/jump drives or Memory Stick/SD card, these storage devices are unlikely, depending on use of course, to accumulate fragmented free space to a significant enough degree. An occasional defrag with Diskeeper, once or twice a year, will likely be sufficient, as Diskeeper will thoroughly consolidate free space. Where HyperFast is needed is when an SSD is used as the primary drive on a Windows computer (e.g. a new laptop). Windows will create serious free space fragmentation on a "C:" drive in a matter of months.

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MrMagoo

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	Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast Reply #1 - Dec 7^th, 2008 at 11:19am Sounds like an interesting program. Do you know if the wear-leveling included with the embeded controller on most NAND flash drives affects HyperFast's ability to optimize the space?
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Pleonasm

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #2 - Dec 7^th, 2008 at 2:01pm

MrMagoo, I too find the concept of “defragmentation” of a flash drive somewhat odd, since (unlike a traditional hard disk drive) the device employs random access; and would suspect that the wear leveling mechanism would prevent meaningful defragmentation from occurring. Apparently I am mistaken.

See here for benchmark comparisons, showing “5.9x faster reads, 19.5 faster writes, 3.9 faster random reads, and 9.0 faster random writes.” You may wish to also look at Diskeeper’s white paper on HyperFast.

I have submitted a request to Diskeeper to learn the cost and the procedure for upgrading my existing Diskeeper Pro Premier license to include HyperFast, so I have not yet tested this functionality. I’ll report back when I have had a chance to give it a try.

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TheShadow

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #3 - Dec 8^th, 2008 at 7:57am

Besides fragmentation, which I really can't see, STUFF on my Utilities thumb drive just gets messed up. New files replace old files, but the old ones never want to just go away. Grin

On my C: drive, I defrag by doing a Ghost backup followed immediately by a Ghost Restore. That perfectly re-orders the drive with NO spaces and NO fragmentation. I try to do that at least once a week.

With my thumb drive (PNY 4 gig Flash Drive) I get rid of old outdated files and perform a sort-of defrag by just erasing everything from the Flash Drive and re-writing it from the folder on my HD.

Just as a hedge against ever loosing important data, I suggest that anyone using Flash Drives to save their data should use more than one.

Flash drives share one annoying attribute with Hard Drives.....
you just never know the day or hour when one will fail. Angry

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Megaton

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #4 - Dec 8^th, 2008 at 9:02am

Well, I don't have an SSD (yet!) so defragmenting SSDs is an academic question for me. But I've been trying out the trial version of Diskeeper 2009 Pro on my XP desktop with the good old magnetic platter drives, and it's pretty awesome. It defragged all four drives very quickly and did not leave residual fragmentation. Also runs beautifully in automatic mode. Very nice application indeed.

It's interesting to know that free space fragmentation is what affects SSDs. Never could have guessed that. Looks like I need to read up some more on that topic.

I am waiting for SSDs to hit 500GB before I take the plunge. I can't compromise on disk space even for improved performance, especially if I am going to be paying $$$$ for the SSD. Cheesy

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TheShadow

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #5 - Dec 10^th, 2008 at 8:38am

Considering the lack of easy availability and the high price, I'm curious just how many readers are now using an SSD for their OS drive. (?)

After using the highly touted program "Defraggler" to defragment my OS drive and having it totally trash the boot sector, where even a Ghost partition restore couldn't fix it, I'm reluctant to ever try another "De-fragmenting" program.

I wound up "Low Level" formatting that screwed up drive to clear the problems left over by the "Defraggler".
My recovery was to restore my last Ghost Image to a new drive.

So I've gone back to doing what I've been doing for years.....that is to make a Ghost Image of C: and then do an Immediate Ghost restore to C: which totally re-orders the drive, with NO spaces and NO fragmentation. I suspect that would work equally well on a SSD drive.

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MrMagoo

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #6 - Dec 10^th, 2008 at 1:36pm

TheShadow wrote on Dec 10^th, 2008 at 8:38am:

....that is to make a Ghost Image of C: and then do an Immediate Ghost restore to C: which totally re-orders the drive, with NO spaces and NO fragmentation.I suspect that would work equally well on a SSD drive.

I'm not sure that it would. Most NAND flash drives have on-board wear-leveling chips that put data into free space. When you delete a file on a NAND drive, it just marks it for deletion and continues to write new files to free space. The reason wear leveling is needed is because every write (including deletions) wears the space on the drive that was written to. Regularly erasing and writing files would wear out the beginning of the drive if the wear wasn't spread throughout the drive, causing the drive to fail much sooner.

This is why free space fragmentation has such a big impact on write performance. It also means that deleting everything and restoring from a recent Ghost image likely would not do a good job at defragmenting these drives - thus the need for special software.

TheShadow wrote on Dec 10^th, 2008 at 8:38am:

Considering the lack of easy availability and the high price, I'm curious just how many readers are now using an SSD for their OS drive. (?)

Some of the newest SSD drives show incredible read performance compared to platter drives in benchmarking, so these drives are very desirable. Real-world performance and the price have kept them from becoming mainstream. Theoretically, power consumption should also be much lower for these drives since you don't have to continuously spin a platter, so they are starting to show up in laptops (although some studies are also calling this benefit into question.)

For me, usb flash drives make a cheap, silent alternative to hard drives for a firewall or server system that doesn't need much storage, so that's my interest in NAND drives.

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Pleonasm

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #7 - Dec 10^th, 2008 at 5:33pm

Quote:

I'm reluctant to ever try another "De-fragmenting" program

TheShadow, I certainly appreciate your reluctance. However, I can share the fact that I have used Diskeeper for several years on a daily basis, and have never encountered a situation where ‘damage’ was done. As Diskeeper explains...

Quote:

Caution has guided the design of Diskeeper from its inception. Like its predecessors, Diskeeper 2007 moves a file only when it is absolutely certain that no data will be lost; this includes file attributes. In defragging any file, the only change to file attribute-type information is the physical location of the file on the volume. File dates are never changed and no other fields in the file record header are used to store Diskeeper information. Diskeeper assures this by using the Windows “Movefile API” to safely move files while the operating system is active. This essential API was developed jointly by Diskeeper Corporation and Microsoft and has been maintained through generations of Diskeeper. In Diskeeper 2007, as in earlier versions, data is never at risk, even if the computer crashes while Diskeeper is running, or if the user aborts the Diskeeper defragmentation run in the middle of the file relocation process.

Source: http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/Diskeeper-2007-Reviewer's-Guide.pdf

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Pleonasm

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #8 - Dec 10^th, 2008 at 5:34pm

MrMagoo, I suspect that your assessment is correct: defragmentation would not be achieved by simply copying all files from a flash drive, deleting those files from the flash drive, and then restoring them.

While the HyperFast product is currently available for purchase with Diskeeper 2009, current users who wish to add that tool onto a license will need to wait about a month, according to a recent conversation with the sales department at Diskeeper Corporation. It seems that the company doesn’t quite yet have the upgrade process in place.

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MrMagoo

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	Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast Reply #9 - Dec 10^th, 2008 at 8:59pm Thanks for the follow-up. I'm interested in finding out if you see any real-world performance increases.
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Megaton

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Re: Diskeeper: HyperFast
Reply #10 - Dec 11^th, 2008 at 11:31am

TheShadow wrote on Dec 10^th, 2008 at 8:38am:

After using the highly touted program "Defraggler" to defragment my OS drive and having it totally trash the boot sector, where even a Ghost partition restore couldn't fix it, I'm reluctant to ever try another "De-fragmenting" program.

I remember, Defraggler was in beta when I visited their webpage a few months ago; don't know if it is a release version now. I never dared to install it because of the beta factor..can't afford to let an unstable app on to the drive and let it (potentially) have a free run of the whole drive and all the data.

Theoretically any defragmenter that uses the Windows-Diskeeper defrag API should be safe as Pleonasm's link states. But some of the defraggers could be badly coded, resulting in disaster. I don't think most of these 'free' defraggers are tested comprehensively, hence the serious bugs even after the beta stage.

FWIW, I've also used various iterations of Diskeeper on and off (the 2009 trial being the latest) and it's never given me a single problem of any sort.

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