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After initial hopes that Windows NT wouldn't need to be defragmented, Microsoft soon recognized that its NTFS was at least just as much subject to fragmentation as FAT file systems. As a result, the company included a free defragmentation utility in both the server and workstation editions of Windows 2000. This entirely manual utility was better than having nothing at all, but proved unsuitable for enterprise deployment.

In Windows XP, therefore, Microsoft made a few upgrades to the defragmenter for XP Home, Professional and Server editions in attempt to make it more thorough and less limited in an enterprise setting.

This article examines what is new with this built in XP utility and puts it under the microscope to determine if has value in a corporate deployment or should be ignored as a viable solution for network-wide defragmentation concerns.

XP's built-in defragger, Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD), contains several improvements over past versions:

- Fastboot defragmentation: XP incorporates defragmentation technology as part of its new Fastboot technology, designed to bring boot times down to 30 seconds or less. Because defragmentation has proven its ability to boost performance, Microsoft decided to include it as a part of FastBoot. Files that load as part of the boot sequence are defragmented in order to improve speed.

- Scheduling possibilities: While schedtiling is not a native part of this utility, something new with XP is the ability to schedule WDD. To use it, however, the system administrator needs to develop a variety of scripts and batch files that are required for the scheduler. This is probably not something less experienced systems staff should tackle.

Scheduling difficulties aside for a moment, it still is seriously crippled in a number of areas. WDD cannot defragment more than one volume simultaneously, and enough time must be allocated in the defrag schedule to permit the job on one volume to complete before starting the next volume. Otherwise, the process may not complete in the allotted time and therefore will abort. Where there are disks with numerous volumes, large volumes or heavy fragmentation exists; one can expect a lot of aborted defragmentation runs.

Further, the '"lite" scheduling ability mentioned above can only schedule XP boxes in the network. If any NT, 2000 or 9x boxes exist, they cannot be scheduled, thus relegating one to sneaker duty for slow, manual run by the administrator (requires admin privileges to run). The problem is that trying to use the built-in tool can quickly become more work and hassle, with slower and less effective results, than it's worth. As a result of these issues and a number of others, it is unrealistic to easily and effectively schedule defragmentation throughout the enterprise using the built in defragger.

In short, the addition of a limited functionality and hard-to-operate scheduler to the XP defragmenter is a poorly disguised attempt to polish up a piece of coal and represent it as a diamond. At best, the potential to schedule the scaled down utility may have some value in a home or small office environment where there are only a handful of machines to address. But even here, the lack of technical savvy that you typically find outside of corporate IT departments means that the tool will be too cumbersome to use even in small sites.

- System File Defragmentation: For the first time the operating system contains the needed hooks, called APIs, which allow the Master File Table (MFT) to be safely defragmented online. Keeping the MFT defragmented is a key part of keeping file access time low. WDD takes advantage of these APIs resulting in improved performance not possible with the previous defragmenter built into Windows 2000.

While the MFT can now be defragged online in XP, it is best not to allow it to be split in the first place. The MFT Zone can grow in size, but can never shrink, so any extra space it takes is lost until a disk is reformatted. To keep it from splitting, all files on the disk need to be defragmented on a regular basis, and the temp files need to be cleared out frequently.

While an improvement over earlier versions, WDD lacks several essential features that significantly decrease its value in an enterprise environment.

Paging and system files: Windows still lacks the necessary APIs to safety defrag the paging file and file system metafiles online, so these must be done during boot up. But as WDD doesn't perform boot-time defragmentation, it cannot consolidate these files. A fragmented paging file, in particular, can cause significant slowdowns on a machine. And, because the paging file is most in demand when performance is already being limited by overloaded memory, the excess I/Os caused by a severely fragmented paging file heavily affect system speed and responsiveness.

If system speed is important to you, this is especially important due to the fact that in Windows XP, the demand on the paging file is even higher then previous Windows NT based systems.

Priority setting: WDD only operates at a high priority utilizing significant system resources. This means that it competes with the user for the computer's resources. It would therefore normally be scheduled to run off hours to avoid slowing or interrupting users - not possible in many enterprise environments.

If, for example, a program such as Microsoft Word is running on a computer, WDD will compete with that application for system resources. Third-party defragmenters, on the other hand, can be set to run at lower priority, enabling them to be set up to run seamlessly in the background.

Partial defragmentation: When a disk has limited free space, it may not be possible to carry out a complete defragmentation run. In such cases a major performance boost can still be obtained by taking a large file that is split into hundreds of pieces and consolidating it into a few. WDD lacks the current technology needed to perform such an operation. Because the utility was basically designed some time ago, it operates on an "all or nothing" basis and may occasionally worsen fragmentation levels in certain cases.

Exclusion lists: There is no need to use system resources to defragment certain file types, such as when large numbers of temporary files are created and deleted on an ongoing basis. WDD has no facility for specifying types of files or directories to skip. Thus valuable system resources can be wasted defragmenting files that are about to be deleted.

In addition to being a bare-bones utility in terms of features and administrative ease, WDD is also much slower and does not do as thorough a job as third-party software. The defragmentation engine, for instance, is based on 3-year old technology. While its speed was adequate when first designed, it has not kept up with increasing file and disk sizes.

The growth in the size of the Windows operating system itself in the last couple of 'years illustrates the need for faster technology. Three years ago, Windows NT Workstation 4.0 was the standard. It required 110MB hard disk space and 32MB of RAM. Along came Windows 2000 Professional, needing nearly six times the free space (650MB) and double the RAM to 64MB. Now with Windows XP, the demand for space more than doubles to 1.5GB (even more space is needed when installing it over a network) and the RAM requirement is up to 128MB or more.

Applications have similarly grown. Office 97 Professional needed 121MB of disk space; Office 2000 Premium, 526MB and Office XP Professional Special Edition requires more than IGB. On top ofthis come huge multimedia files such as PowerPoint, streaming video, MP3's, etc. To accommodate this expansion, hard disks keep growing so that even a $799 eMachines PC now comes with a 60GB drive.

While all the new features that accompany these software upgrades are wonderful, these larger files also take far longer to defrag. The WDD engine may not seem so slow on a 110MB drive, but is extremely sluggish on today's large drives and in many cases, will hang mid-run as the drives are just too big for it to deal with.

How much faster are third-party products on the market? Conshohocken, Penn.-based National Software Testing Laboratories (NSTL) ran speed tests to compare the manual disk defragmenter in Windows 2000 against Executive Software Inc.'s (Burbank, Calif) Diskeeper, (Note: their latest release, Diskeeper 7.0, is the first third-party defragmenter fully certified by Microsoft for use on Windows XP).

NSTL tried both utilities on four different configurations: a 9GB partition on a PC hard drive, a 30GB software RAID 5 array using three Seagate 18.4GB disks in a Compaq server, a 15OGB RAID 5 hardware array comprised of 10 disks, and a two-by-60GB hardware RAID 5 array.