Diskeeper 2011 with TS12

[Approach_Medium]

Hi;
I have been using Auslogics disk defrag for a couple of years, mainly because I don't like to have automatic defrag running while TS is running, being it a performance hit when loading/saving or anything else that uses the disk during gameplay.

That said, I am tired of running a manual defrag every couple of days on my TS drive (it's on the same physical drive that Win 7 is, but a separate partition). TS seems to cause a lot of fragmentation.

So today I downloaded and installed the 30 day trial version of Diskeeper 2011.
I know that Trainzers have suggested not running any sort of automatic defragmentation program while running Trainz, but I thought maybe the performance boost that a defragmented drive provides would be greater than any performance hit caused by the defragger running in the background.
I don't care if it takes a few more seconds to load/save sessions & routes, but if it is going to cause an issue with game play, I won't like it.

Does anyone have experience with Diskeeper 2011 running on Windows 7 with TS 10 or 12?

Thanks

FW

 

[Azervich]

Hi;
TS seems to cause a lot of fragmentation.
Thanks

FW

Trainz doesn't cause the drives to be all fragmented, only new installs are fragmented with any drive, I haven't defrag my drive in several months, lol

-Aaron

 

[NikkiA]

Trainz doesn't cause the drives to be all fragmented, only new installs are fragmented with any drive, I haven't defrag my drive in several months, lol

-Aaron

The database system of trainz MAY actually encourage some fragmentation - as a CDP is expanded to the 'editing' directory then committed into the 'local' directory before being deleted. Copying and deleting lots of little files is pretty much an easy way to create a fragmented disk.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with Diskeeper, I used to use it, but 'Defraggler' does pretty much everything Diskeeper does, but is free (and Piriform are a trustable and reliable company before anyone pulls the 'free software is automatically dodgy' routine).

 

[fran1]

Defraggler's ok, I use it when I remember. It sorts everything out except the page file system of which I have 3gb fragmented.
2010+2006 are in partitions on there own drive.

 

[johnwhelan]

If you start with a clean disk then most .exe files will be contiguous. What you really want is groups of files to be grouped together on the disk. It doesn't really matter if one file is broken up into 5 sections when you open a program you want to load up various config files etc. and for performance reasons you want the files to be on the same track to save head to head as it moves from one track to another. Oh and don't forget that the what the disk drive presents as a track to the operating system is no longer a physical track, since the outer tracks are longer and can hold more data than the inner tracks the disk drives rearrange the data to make it appear as though all tracks are the same length.

If you keep the desk less than 80% full and run a defrag every six months or so I honestly don't think you see much difference than if you run a background defragmenter all the time. If you really want to do a good job, format the drive then reload it from a back up, however do think through the implications before doing this.

I used to work with large databases and enamel bucket loading and unloading of databases so hard drive performance was something I dabbled in.

Cheerio John

 

[Approach_Medium]

I installed Diskeeper mainly to defrag the MFT and pagefile. However, I'm not convinced that the MFT ever needs defragging, especially in later versions of Windows (I run Win7 Ultimate).

Thinking about the pagefile, I can easily defrag it by deleting it, defragging the drive it's on, then re-creating it; or at least I would assume that would work.

I used to be a devout Diskeeper user, but got tired of spending $39 for upgrades, and when I upgraded to Win7 and Diskeeper 8 would no longer run, I decided to try one of the freebies (Auslogics).
I like Auslogics, but as I said in my OP it does not do anything automatically.

I have been getting terrible fragmentation of the drive TS12 is on in only a week's time. I don't know what is really going on here. After a while I notice that it does take longer to load the routes, and occasionally the game pauses to grab data from the disk.

But let me add that I am running TS12 on a very old system.

Asus P5AD2-E Premium
Intel P4 (single core) 3.4G
3Gigs DDR2 @ 533Mhz
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB (Upgraded to this card about 2yrs ago)
Approx 1TB total HDD (4 physical drives of varying size and speed) with TS12 on a separate partition from the OS.

Antec 550W True Power
Antec tower case
Several cooling fans, including Thermalright hi-volume CPU fan and heat sink.

FW

 

[jrfolco]

I have Diskeeper 2011 on my desktop computer running Win XP Pro, and on my laptop running Win 7.

Both computers have TS2010, and TS12 installed along with all of my routes and I have not experienced any problems with Diskeeper 2011 running in the background during operations in TS2010, or TS12.


Joe

 

[nugget2225]

reply nugget 2225

if you have a large hardrive 500 gig or more i would suggest shrinking your harddrive down into a smaller partition, if your worried about fragmetation you dont have to worry about files getting scattered all over your drive, i use perfect disk 12 it also has a free trial and keeps my raid 0 in good working order, i have a total of 1 tb in my raid and have my first partition down to 250 gig and the second partition in my case is empty, i know i have read that changing partition sizes dont make a difrence but it has for me, just a suggestion.

 

[JCitron]

Defragmenting the drives does help with Trainz. I've seen this myself with performance differences between an untouched drive, and one that was defragmented.

One of the things I noticed is that it's not so much the data, as in little files that are causing the problem, but actually the database file its self. When that becomes fragmented, the system will stutter. Perhaps this has to do with the pointer indexing that takes place within the program as it accesses the Assets.tdx file.

I have found a nifty utility for this called contig.exe This is available from Microsoft, or actually their Systems Internals website link.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default <---- There are lots of other nifty little utilities here.

Now Contig.exe is a command line utility, and needs to be run as Administrator under Vista and above.

Open an Administrator-enabled command prompt and type the following from your Utils folder, or wherever you downloaded the program to. (There's no install).

Contig D:\Auran\Ts12\Userdata\Assets.tdx

The path shown above is my install path for my TS12 install, so change this to suit what you need.

John