Efficient PC usage depends on maximising the
capabilities of the hard disc. Third-party software may offer
advantages over what is available on your operating
system
Disc utilities belong to an all but forgotten branch of the
computer industry. Not so many years ago these useful programs were
essential tools in the IT department’s box of tricks and there were
plenty of products to choose from. Today, it is hard for most
people to stretch beyond the Symantec range of products, primarily
Norton Utilities or Partition Magic, and many jobs that used to be
routine are now left undone.
It is only 25 years since the PC was created by IBM, and its
operating system roots were firmly planted in the CP/M system
developed by Digital Research.
The IBM PC assisted Microsoft’s rise to fame because IBM needed
an operating system for its new device. Digital Research was not
available, but Microsoft’s founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen
recognised the golden opportunity that IBM was offering.
Buying in a product called QDos (reputedly an acronym for “quick
and dirty operating system”), Microsoft created MS-Dos (Microsoft
Disk Operating System) and the foundations of an empire were
laid.
In effect, MS-Dos was to CP/M what Linux is to Unix today. It
offered a new way of solving the same problem, but initially
offered a refinement of what went before rather than a radical new
look at what the operating system could be.
MS-Dos was an unfriendly environment and needed management. One
of the operating system’s glaring omissions was that it offered
users no way to recover files that had been accidentally
deleted.
Peter Norton saw an opportunity and created a simple undelete
function, packaged it and gained a fair degree of success. The
product, Norton Utilities, has been upgraded and enhanced many
times over the years, and currently contains more than 50 useful
tools for recovering and managing Windows data at a low level. A
well-designed interface allows relatively non-technical users to
deploy Norton Utilities’ functions with ease.
The undelete function has been a cornerstone of Norton
Utilities. Symantec acquired Norton in 1990, and other companies
such as Mace and Central Point Software likewise rose and fell
victim to acquisitive competitors such as Symantec and Network
Associates/McAfee.
Microsoft has also flirted with the utilities market and there
are still some useful, but not well-publicised, features buried in
Windows. Windows’ main built-in utilities are its defragmentation
and disc partitioning functions.
Defragmenting is the process of tidying up data storage on a
single disc. As a disc fills up, the operating system stores data
wherever it can find enough space. Although this is good for making
the maximum storage space available, it can affect system
performance and slow the disc-drive down.
The problem is that larger files are broken down into blocks of
data, which are stored and indexed all over the disc. When a file
is read back into the computer, its constituent blocks have to be
reassembled in memory.
When a disc is new (and therefore largely empty), file blocks
are stored in a methodical and highly efficient way, but as time
passes and the disc fills with data, so free space becomes harder
to find and the system stores blocks of a file anywhere that space
allows, with the result that files become increasingly fragmented
over time. This forces the drive to spend more and more time
hunting blocks down when it needs them, and large files accordingly
take longer to load.
Defragmentation, or defragging, is a housekeeping process that
tidies up the disc and moves the data blocks of a file closer
together so that the disc drive can work at maximum speed.
Clive Longbottom, service director for business process analysis
at Quocirca, remains unconvinced by Microsoft’s defragmentation
programme.
Microsoft’s defragmenter is based on software from Diskeeper,
formerly known as Executive Software, but lacks the ability to zone
commonly used application code on the disc, which would make access
even faster. However, the real problem is that while Diskeeper’s
branded software and Symantec’s defragmenter work in the
background, the native Windows utility makes the system unavailable
during a defragmentation process that can take several hours.
The current argument is not so much about which disc organiser
is best, but whether they are necessary at all. In the past when
storage was at a premium, defragmentation could offer beneficial
speed improvements in the 50%-80% range, but times have changed and
Diskeeper rates the average speed improvement from defragmenting as
ranging between 10% and 20%.
“For users with, say, a 350Gbyte disc with less than 100Gbytes
of data on it, fragmentation will be low,” said Longbottom. “It
will only become a big problem when the disc reaches about 65%-75%
full. These days, fragmentation is far less of a problem than when
we were struggling with 50Mbyte discs.”
The improvements in reliability and pre-emptive disc caching
have negated some of the problems relating to fragmentation, but
significant improvements can still be gained where data streaming
of large files is common.
If defragmentation is chosen, the benefits of background
defragmentation are outweighed by the overhead this places on
individual PCs. Longbottom is an advocate of the practice of
keeping the defragmenter in the systems administrator’s domain.
“Tools for speeding up machines should not be left in the hands
of users,” he said. “The technical staff should control this, and
companies should be utilising centralised management tools to carry
out these tasks overnight or at other low-usage times.”
The partitioning utility that Microsoft bundles with Windows is
even more basic than its defragmenter.
The option seems to have been included as a one-off method to
separate a single disc into several virtual discs. The basic
features provided are aimed at conditioning discs on new PCs or
preparing a new disc added to an existing computer. Once a disc has
been split into virtual drive partitions it is impossible to change
anything at a later date without destroying some or all of the
data.
This is where commercial products come in useful. Symantec’s
Partition Magic is one of the best known, but there are several
alternatives, including Acronis Disk Director Suite, VCOM Partition
Commander, Paragon Partition Manager, and the freeware utility
Visopsys. Most of these packages run under Windows, but they can
also create Linux partitions as well as all Microsoft storage
formats from Dos to NTFS.
Partitioning is particularly useful for current large hard
discs, to separate the operating system, applications and data into
separate areas. This can prevent all data being corrupted should a
malfunction occur, and protect against certain virus attacks. The
separation of data from applications and the operating system can
also make backups easier to configure.
These disc utilities are aimed at consumers and small businesses
because most larger enterprises partition a reference configuration
and then distribute that as an image.
When it comes to creating an image, Symantec Ghost is the clear
leader, but there is a cheaper option in G4U (Ghost for Unix).
Although G4U may sound unsuitable for Windows, it boots the
workstation from a floppy disc and the image produced can then be
distributed using any chosen Windows system.
Undelete may have been the software that kicked off the whole
utilities market, but it still has a role today. The software’s job
is made relatively easy by the fact that a computer does not
actually obliterate a file when a user presses the delete key.
Instead, it merely replaces the first character of the filename
with a particular letter that the system uses to denote a deleted
file. Simply by changing this character back to the original
character, the undelete utility can revive the file.
There is one important caveat with undelete and that is that the
deletion process makes any space used by the file available for
re-use by other files. If this has happened, then the file will be
gone forever, overwritten by other data in a subsequent
operation.
Worse can happen if the disc’s own filing system is damaged. The
filing system is where the disc keeps a map of itself, including
where partitions start and finish and what files are present. These
may be damaged by viral activity, accidental formatting or disc
corruption.
Businesses have thrived in the data recovery area but many, such
as Vogon International, are concerned with physically damaged
discs. Sometimes a drive can be recovered by software utilities.
Even reformatted discs can be recovered unless they have been
securely erased.
Chengdu Yiwo Tech Development Company has a range of products
under the Easeus range. The suite comprises Data Recovery Service,
Data Recovery Software, Partition Recovery Service, Partition
Recovery Software, Data Security Software and File Repair
Service.
Other packages include the small but effective Active@ series of
utilities. Active@ Undelete is not a file undelete program, but a
data recovery suite that helps to recover lost, deleted and
formatted data on local and network drives, as well as removable
drives and digital media cards. It also supports EFS (encrypting
file system) file recovery and damaged Raid (redundant array of
independent discs) reconstruction, and can create a disc image to
protect data from future mishaps.
Longbottom feels that the advent of Windows Vista next year will
change the utility software market substantially.
“Overall, I see the utility suite market cooling down, unless
the suppliers involved can come up with new stuff under Vista that
does far more than Microsoft will do,” he said.
“This will probably be less techie and more user-focused. I
would guess at it being a mix of personalisation tools and
multimedia optimisation tools, but still backed up with a full
anti-malware tool for virus, spyware, adware removal and so
on.”
Disaster and defrag under Linux
There are many Linux utilities available of varying quality. The
best way to find the most acceptable is to see what is recommended
by Red Hat, SuSE, IBM and other major supporters. Most of the
packages are free to download so you can test out several to see
which most suits your purposes.
Linux file systems resist disc fragmentation. A typical Linux
disc partition would typically be between 2% and 5% fragmented and
rarely exceed 20% fragmentation.
For this reason the Ex2defrag program is rarely used, especially
as the partition has to be unmounted, and therefore becomes
unusable during processing.
Many systems administrators would regard as unacceptable having
to put a partition out of service for the duration of a
defragmentation.
There is also an argument that defragmenting files actually
degrades performance and disc space availability by undoing the
benefits of the sparse file storage that is employed by Linux.
Linux also has an inbuilt method for recovering deleted files.
It is not a simple process and there are free utilities, such as
the Linux Files Undelete Utility and GtkRecover to help, but even
then the process is more complicated than in Windows, especially if
the file is large.
When Linux loads up, it offers the chance to partition the disc.
If the partitioning needs to be done later, many of the Windows
partitioning applications can be used by booting up from the CD or
from a floppy disc.
Disaster recovery is a little easier on Linux than on Windows.
Knoppix, for example, offers a disc-bootable version of Debian
Linux with the K Desktop Environment graphical user interface on CD
or DVD. The disc also holds several utilities to help correct
errors on the failed disc to clean it up and make it bootable
again.