Have you received your Windows 7 Launch Party Pack yet? Have you sent out the invites? Prepped the guacamole?

There’s not much time left as Thursday, November 22 is the big day. Will you be upgrading your client’s machines (from XP or Vista) to the latest operating system or are you going to perform a “clean” install? I’ve spoken with a number of VAR’s and they’ve indicated a clean install is their preferred method. What’s yours?

Many VAR’s have indicated a slow and steady rollout with some of their customers opting to finally pull the trigger and purchase new pre-installed systems.

And the question I’m asked, “what about Diskeeper… will it work with Windows 7?” is an easy one to answer.

Yes.

Diskeeper 2009 and HyperFast fully support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2, and have since we released them back in December 2008. V-locity (our Hyper-V solution), also fully supports the new Windows platforms.

So pace yourselves with the chips and champagne. And remember to install Diskeeper.

Anthony

Diskeeper 2009 and HyperFast fully support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2, and have since we released them back in December 2008. V-locity also fully supports the new Windows platforms.

That said, the next major release of Diskeeper (coming soon) will also take advantage of new functionality in Windows 7. Windows 7 allows for additional online metadata defrag, including $Extend  (think USN Journal here) and also $Secure.

This past year, we've also been engaged with Microsoft's Front Runner compatibility program. Microsoft  is going to great lengths to ensure the upgrade process (e.g. install Windows 7 upgrade over Vista) is seamless for their customers. Something I did not see with the Vista release, is the degree of involvement they have required from software vendors such as us, to ensure reliability and stability for users who take the upgrade path.

On to Undelete...

Undelete 2009 will support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2 around the time that those new OS'es release to public (i.e. Oct 22nd). We'll post/email instructions for Undelete 2009 customers regarding how to get the new update when the software is available. All in all, supporting Windows 7 has not required significant code changes, but there's a great deal of quality control testing we always require before we can certify our software for release. 

As part of that testing process, a few weeks ago several of our senior developers were at Microsoft's bi-annual IFS PlugFest. PlugFest is a meeting of file system filter driver developers that we've been regularly attending for years. At this interoperability forum, we can test our solutions alongside those from other manufacturers. The perfect timing of this event allowed us to test the updated Undelete on the new Windows platforms with file system filter drivers from other vendors. We also had the opportunity to test some new, very advanced (but as yet unreleased) new technologies!

Early next week we'll publish a new white paper that covers 21 technical points to consider when evaluating a disk optimization solution. While it is focused on IT professionals evaluating Diskeeper for business desktops/laptops, many of the points apply to all users. Test results regarding one such universal consideration is provided below:

Often overlooked, but just as significant as file fragmentation, is free space fragmentation. Fragmented free space will inevitably increase the likelihood and degree of fragmentation of data and system files. Diskeeper has advanced solutions to consolidate space into a small handful of very large segments in order to improve future file-write performance.

Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) in Vista provides no option to consolidate file system free space. While tests demonstrate the number of free space segments is reduced after using WDD, a high number (7403 fragments) remain and the average free space segment size increases marginally.  Rather than increasing the size of the largest free space segment, (desirable) the free space segment was reduced from ~39GB to ~10GB.

Compared to the Windows 7 Disk Defragmenter, Diskeeper provided far superior results, eliminating free space fragmentation as a performance issue. Diskeeper grouped free space segments so as to create a much larger average size (measured in the GB) and created a 33+ GB ‘largest’ chunk size.  

While a free space defragmentation command line option has been introduced in Windows 7, test results show free space is less effectively defragmented than in the default mode. 

WDD provides a few command line parameters which allow it to apply different algorithms, each intended to solve fragmentation in various environments; such as ‘run free space consolidation mode.’ Diskeeper includes various, and numerous, defragmentation algorithms. However, at the core of the Diskeeper program is an advanced logic controller that, with a focus on how to best restore file system performance, automatically selects a special algorithm for a particular environment. There is never a need to manually analyze and make administrative decisions and then adjust operational parameters to run a different type of defrag task. If free space fragmentation is a performance issue, Diskeeper dynamically recognizes this and solves the problem without administrative intervention.

In summary, only Diskeeper provides a solution to consolidate free space, thereby preventing file-write performance degradation for future write activity on a given volume.