Defragmenter for low-spec Amigas?

[Ral-Clan]

Hi,

Nowadays we are getting access to old and new hardware that allows us to attach what once would have been considered unthinkably large hard drives (and other storage media) to our low-spec wedge Amigas.

For instance, I just attached a 2.1GB hard drive to my A500 (SCSI) and I'm sure others have attached much larger hard drives.

After doing this, I installed my favourite defragmenting tool, ReOrg, on this Amiga.

I tested it out and it said "Not enough memory" --- reading the docs apparently it needs like 7K per MB plus some more cache RAM, etc. etc.

I had always used this tool with my A2000, which had about 50MB of RAM installed - so I never ran into this problem. It was a bit of a surprise.

I'm using an A500 with about 4MB RAM total.

So what is the tool of choice that will allow us to defrag these large volumes when attached to a low-spec Amiga?

[Rob]

QuarterBack tools has a de-frag tool.

[ChaosLord]

All you have to do is:
1. Copy all files over to another, empty partition.  This new partition is now defragulated.

2. You can now delete everything off the first partition, then copy everything back if you like.

Works on every Amiga with any amount of RAM.

I suggest adding some buffers using the AddBuffers command before you do your mass copy because it will speed things up a lot.  If you have the RAM you can do AddBuffers 1000 to both source and destination drives.

This idea works even better when you have 2 separate hard drives.  There is less head-thrashing that way so the copying goes much faster.

Or if you use a solid state hard drive that eliminates the head thrashing also.

[Crumb]

Hi,

Nowadays we are getting access to old and new hardware that allows us to attach what once would have been considered unthinkably large hard drives (and other storage media) to our low-spec wedge Amigas.

For instance, I just attached a 2.1GB hard drive to my A500 (SCSI) and I'm sure others have attached much larger hard drives.

After doing this, I installed my favourite defragmenting tool, ReOrg, on this Amiga.

I tested it out and it said "Not enough memory" --- reading the docs apparently it needs like 7K per MB plus some more cache RAM, etc. etc.

I had always used this tool with my A2000, which had about 50MB of RAM installed - so I never ran into this problem. It was a bit of a surprise.

I'm using an A500 with about 4MB RAM total.

So what is the tool of choice that will allow us to defrag these large volumes when attached to a low-spec Amiga?

Chaos Lord method is very compatible and effective if you have enough space. In case you don't have space and use FFS/OFS ReOrg worked nicely with my miggies (don't use it with HDs bigger than 4GB!)

[gertsy]

Shhhh! don't tell everybody. A lot of people think HD fragmentation is only a Windows problem.

[haywirepc]

Generally it is... I've never defragged an amiga hard drive, never knew I needed to, I guess my amigas had very small hd's and  stay pretty clean, never saw it as a prob.

No defrag probs on linux...

:laugh1:

[polyp2000]

Are there any alternative file systems for the Amiga that do not require defrag?

N.

[Crumb]

Are there any alternative file systems for the Amiga that do not require defrag?

N.

"PFS3 AIO" would be perfect, it's compatible with 68000 and OS1.3, autoselects scsi-direct, TD64 and NSD64... Toni Willen did an outstanding job :-)

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/pfs3aio

[bloodline]

Or if you use a solid state hard drive that eliminates the head thrashing also.

If you use Solid State media, then forget about fragmentation. It it not an issue for these devices as there is no physical difference where the blocks that make up the file are stored. Contiguous or as far apart as the physical media allows, the time to select a block will be te same.

[Ral-Clan]

Chaos Lord method is very compatible and effective if you have enough space. In case you don't have space and use FFS/OFS ReOrg worked nicely with my miggies (don't use it with HDs bigger than 4GB!)

But as I said in my first post, ReOrg says it's out of memory on my 4MB RAM A500 (2MB CHIP 2MB FAST).

[ChaosLord]

If you use Solid State media, then forget about fragmentation. It it not an issue for these devices as there is no physical difference where the blocks that make up the file are stored. Contiguous or as far apart as the physical media allows, the time to select a block will be te same.

100% True.  Fragmentation does not hurt Flash drives.

[psxphill]

100% True. Fragmentation does not hurt Flash drives.

While they don't have to deal with rotational delay or seek time, some file systems will have a CPU overhead when dealing with fragmented files.
 
If the flash memory is connected to a decent controller then only issuing one read request is likely to be faster than issuing many.
 
Modern RAM is solid state, but can read from contiguous locations faster than random access. So it's possible that some flash memory could have similar properties.

[danbeaver]

Original question: Defrag Utilities

ReOrg, B.A.D., QuarterBack Tools, AmiBack Tools

These are all available on-line if you know where to look.

B.A.D. worked on my A500 back in the old days; QBT was good; I have AmiBack Tools, but haven't used the Defrag. There are others available I can't remember.

[psxphill]

Original question: Defrag Utilities
 
ReOrg, B.A.D., QuarterBack Tools, AmiBack Tools
 
These are all available on-line if you know where to look.

I actually wouldn't defrag an FFS partition since I had Reorg destroy my hard disk one time when it crashed half way through.
 
I'd probably just go for either SFS or PFS. Both have online defragmentation and I would trust it more.

[paul1981]

I actually wouldn't defrag an FFS partition since I had Reorg destroy my hard disk one time when it crashed half way through.
 
I'd probably just go for either SFS or PFS. Both have online defragmentation and I would trust it more.

I'm pretty sure SFS doesn't defragment itself. It certainly didn't defragment my drive when I had two 1.6GB partitions.

I had ReOrg crash my drive as well (many years ago)...it was my own fault though, ReOrg is actually a fantastic program. :cool: