"How To Speed Up Your Internet Experience
Using Diskeeper 2009

Complete Transcript of
Michael Materie - Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
April 11 2009

Alan:  Everyone wants a fast computer; this is especially true while we are on the Internet. No one wants to wait around for downloads and for uploads and we certainly want our surfing to be as fast as possible. How can we improve this experience? Our guest today is Michael Materie, Director of Product Management with Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Michael.

Michael:  Hi, Alan. Thanks for having me back, again.

Alan:  We are seeing more people download large files from the Internet, whether they are video files or MP3 files or even complete TV shows. All of these files are being saved on our hard drive, and whether they are being saved in one piece or scattered all over our hard drive seems to have a direct relationship on just how fast the download takes, doesn’t it?

Michael:  Absolutely. Those files of that type are going to be relative to putting all the pieces back together and how fast your hard drive is able to do that. It has to move a mechanical disk head across to go locate and collect them.

Probably what a lot of folks are familiar with, is that hard drives have different performance characteristics. Obviously, one drive can be faster than another; it can spin at a faster rpm (revolutions per minute) than the next drive. Another thing that is pretty standard across hard disk drives is that the outside part of the hard drive is generally quite a bit faster than the inside part of the hard drive. It makes sense it is just general physics.

I’d say that another characteristic that we look for with our Software, understands and properly accommodates for, is putting the files that you do use, the important files, to the faster parts of the hard disk drive. Putting the files that you use the most to the faster parts of the disk can basically give you the absolute best speed you’re be able to get for file access.

Alan:  How important is free space when you are doing defragmentation? When I’m going to download a file from the Web; I want it put in a contiguous location right now. I don’t want to have to worry about working with it later. So, how important is free space?

Michael:  Free space defragmentation is definitely one of the major benefits of defragmentation. When we say, "defragmentation" we are really talking about file defragmentation and "free space defragmentation", which is often called, "free space consolidation."

And as you suggested, if you are downloading a file, say if you've got a NetFlix service or something like that and you’re downloading a large video file, you definitely want that written into a contiguous file to free space.

Part of the defrag process is when it’s running to not only put the file fragments together, but make sure that your free space is in really big chunks, so we reduce the possibility that new files, when are they written could start out fragmented, for example.

Alan:  Something that you've added to the 2009 Version of Diskeeper is that you've put in a new, powerful Free Space Defragmentation Engine.

Michael:  Right. We have certainly been doing free space defragmentation for many, many years. What we looked at this year was consolidating down into really 6-12 or so really, really large chunks of your free space. If you have a terabyte drive, we want about 900 gigabytes of that into just 6 or 12 really large chunks. That’s one of the new improvements we’ve put into the Diskeeper 2009 Product.

Alan:  So, I can actually drfrag the Windows swap file, because that’s the heaviest file that gets hit all the time with the Windows Operating System; because everything that doesn’t fit in memory goes into that swap file. Is there a faster way to maintain that Windows swap file and how would we do it?

Michael:  One of the things that you know very well, Alan is that that paging file on the Windows System is going to be created, initially, when you build your operating system is a fixed size with the ability to be expanded and grow as you need it more.

One of the technologies that we have that helps out with information, with respect to the use of your paging file, is the frag shell feature, which is actually analyzing your usage of your paging file and will help provide you some recommended settings to either adjust it or to create it into a fixed size. A fixed size would be maybe doubling the size of your RAM in your computer and preventing it from going further because it probably wouldn’t be needed beyond that. Thereby, you would actually be able to prevent it from fragmenting it in the future, by presetting the size for the file.

Alan:  How do you handle files that are basically open and being used, like the Windows swap file, for instance? It's constantly being used and to all extents and purposes, it's a, "locked file?" Once I resized it to a fixed size, how do I make sure that it’s optimized?

Michael:  There are a hand full of files in Windows are not supported, with respect to "online defragmentation," defragmenting while your system’s up and running; because as you alluded to - they are locked. Paging files is one of those key files. There is also another hand full of other system files.

We have had in the Diskeeper Product for many years, a feature called the Boot-Time Defragmentation. You can go to the Diskeeper User Interface and find out that the basic file is fragmented, because you just expanded it to a fixed size. You want to now keep it permanently corrected and defragmented and go to the Boot-Time Defrag feature; select to defragment some system files, your paging files for example.

During the next reboot of your computer the special Diskeeper technology will go in and before you have actually launched Windows and locked those key files, it will defragment them and essentially place them into a nice, contiguous zone of free space.

Alan:  Yes, because everybody likes to have fast boot up computer. It used to be that the slowest part of the computer was what they called, the "POST," where it had to count the memory and see what was going on and make sure all the hardware talks to the operating system. But now, you can actually turn that off and now the boot process in Windows is the slowest part of booting up. Now, with putting the files where they need to be, you can actually speed that up.

Michael:  Absolutely. We've done a lot of tests where if you have a fragmented paging file (2500 pieces), which is not really uncommon, it can slow your boot up by 10-20 seconds and more; which is a hefty 25-30% or more, potentially for the time it takes to boot up your computer.

Alan:  Now, one of the things that a lot of people do is they set their computer to "hibernate," which means, "I'm just going to push a couple buttons and my computer is going to sleep and then when I push another button, it's going to wake up and almost instantly appear on my screen." They use something called a "hibernation file" that does that. But, that file can be fragmented and that can slow things down.

Michael:  It’s another one of those system files that is also locked while the system is up and running. Another additional benefit of the Boot-Time in Diskeeper is during that reboot is that you can consolidate that hibernation file, which will be on a set size and once that’s done, your hibernation then resumes from hibernation will be much, much faster in your future.

Alan:  Well, I know a lot of people procrastinate. They have used their computer over and over again; it’s got all kinds of garbage files on their computer system and now they find out that they’re almost running out of hard drive space and they still want to defrag their system. How do we do that?

Michael:  That’s something that you really need to look at you with advanced solutions for with a product like Diskeeper that is especially built for those kinds of extreme cases. If you have a terabyte hard drive, you’re going to put a terabyte of data on it. If you have a 2 terabyte drive, you’re going to find two terabytes of data to put on it.

We all tend to fill up the space that we have, so we're all going to run into at some point and time, the scenario where we have got 1 or 2% free space and we still need our data to be accessed as fast as possible. We're going to expect our defragmentation technology to be able to accommodate those kinds of situations. That's something that we have engineered with our Diskeeper Product is the ability to work in all sorts of tough cases.

Alan:  You can actually defrag our whole computer system, even if we have less than 1% free space.

Michael:  Yep. I’ve intentionally tested on my own box and reduced it down it down to .1% free space on a 200-gig drive and still had it complete the defrag job.

Alan:  Well, people have the misconception that the bigger the hard drive; the less I have to worry about defragmentation. However, everything that we do using a Windows Operating System, whether it’s just turning it on or getting a system update or going out to the Web is going to write all these temporary garbage files. I call them "garbage" because supposedly, Windows erases them after they use them - and in the act of writing them and erasing them leaves holes.

Michael:  And combined with that is that Windows is going to also try to reuse, especially, those kinds of spaces that are re-released. So, if you’re browsing a bunch of websites and close the browser, it releases and deletes those Internet cache files and then you go and copy a 1-gigabyte file all over from say a USB thumb drive.

It’s going to be written, most likely, across those Internet cache holes, as you noted, and become fragmented. Really, it’s just the design of the Operating System we’re all going to experience in the world of fragmentation and also free space consolidation are going to come into big play.

Alan:  Well, I’ve seen cases where someone has a really large hard drive and it starts filling up and he says, "Well, now what I really need to do before it really slows down is I’m going to organize the hard drive; I’m going to find all the files that I need to delete and then delete them." So, then they go to their Temporary Internet Files and they delete those; they go to their Temporary file section and they start deleting those. And all of a sudden the computer starts getting slower and slower. Why?

Michael:  You know, Windows has its own algorithms that they are geared toward certain types of help to get files down to the drive quicker, but it’s not going to do anything with respect to trying to keeping those things fragment-free. So, as you are clearing up files, whether it happens automatically or you do it as part of your house cleaning. Those holes that get created in the system are more than likely going to be the holes into which the next file write is going to be played.

Alan:  And so, in the act of fixing your computer and trying to make it more streamlined, we've actually made it slower? Wow!

Michael:  It certainly can be the case.

Alan:  When you start talking about fragmentation and defragmentation and utility programs - some people look at it and say, "Okay, this is too complicated for me. I don’t need a utility program to work on my computer; I’ve got enough problems with word processing and maybe using a spread sheet or paying bills." It’s got to be easy to use - Diskeeper 2009 is easy to use, isn’t it?

Michael:  It kind of goes back to the point we were talking about with respect to resources. Say we get a great security product that doesn’t actually intrude on system resources; if we have to figure out how to push a million buttons in it to make it work and do its thing, again, it’s costing us our time to have a secure computer.

Maybe there are some trade-offs you can make but really the ideal situation is that you get a technology that runs on your computer; you never see it; it’s invisible; you don’t have to figure out 17,000 buttons to push to make it do the right thing to keep it secure and keep your computer faster.

That’s really our ultimate goal with software is that we’re trying to get something that is under our trademark slogan, "Set it and forget it." You put it on the computer; it does everything for you. Our engineers have figured out what needs to happen, where and when. We have worked to make sure that the amount of involvement that a user as to have with the Product, really, is pushing the set-up buttons to install it. At that point in time, they don’t really need to do anything else.

There are certainly lots of screens and configurations that if anybody is interested in they can go in there and tweak the Product to their heart’s delight. But, the out-of-the-box experience with Diskeeper is going to work for 99.99% of the people out there.

Alan:  Where can we find more information about your Diskeeper Products and also about defragmentation, in general?

Michael:  Our Website is www.diskeeper.com

Alan:  Michael, as always, it’s been our pleasure to have you here as our guest on Let's Talk Computers, showing us how we can keep our computers running at its optimum speed. We look forward to having you on the air again, real soon.

Michael:  Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having us, again.