The VAR Guy double-checked this rumor and got confirmation: Diskeeper may leap beyond Windows to offer disk defragmentation software on Linux and Mac OS X. What’s motivating the potential Diskeeper moves? Here’s the scoop.
First, a little background: As of June 2007, Diskeeper had sold more than 25 million licenses of its disk defragmentation software for Windows. Over the years, The VAR Guy has repeatedly asked sources close to Diskeeper whether the company planned to port its software over to Linux and Mac OS X. The standard reply: “Not at this time.”
But last night, during a casual conversation, one trusted source told The VAR Guy that Diskeeper was taking another close look at Linux and Mac OS X. If The VAR Guy was a betting man with cash in hand, he’d bet Mac OS X support is coming, and Linux support is potential on tap for the long haul.
So, why is Diskeeper reconsidering the Mac OS X and Linux markets? Three potential answers:
1. More Predictable Code Changes: On the Linux front, Diskeeper had been concerned about keeping pace with rapid changes to Linux’s kernel, as well as continued changes from Linux distributions. But as Linux matured and long term Linux became more popular, Diskeeper’s market concerns subsided.
2. Virtualization: Every virtual machine is subject to fragmentation, claims one source close to Diskeeper. So if a server is running dozens of virtual machines (Windows or Linux), that’s an opportunity for Diskeeper to sell dozens of new licenses.
3. Market Share: Yes, Mac OS X’s market share has climbed steadily in recent years, nearly nearly 10 percent of the desktop/laptop market in 2008, up from 7.3 percent in 2007, notes Netapplications.com. Mac OS X’s momentum has forced Diskeeper to take a second look at the Apple market.
That’s all for now. This is a pretty big blog entry for a pretty small rumor.
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But Linux filesystems don’t need defragging, because unlike Windows filesystems, they are sophisticated and reliable, and fragmentation is not a problem. Perhaps Diskeeper is counting on the ignorance of Windows refugees who are new to Linux? Sell the anti-malware software, too, they won’t need that either!
Defrag on Linux??
Someone already tried that. I think it improved, maybe, 0.05% performance.
AFAIK EXT3 doesn’t need defrag.
The VAR Guy must concede: He’s been running Ubuntu since July 2007 and he’s never had to defrag his hard drive. However, our resident blogger hasn’t ever checked if the hard drive needs a defrag.
This crap is needed, because according to some “industrial standarts” every OS should have defrag and AV in order to be considered as Enterprise ready. A lot of decision makers still think in MS way of doing things.
@comments: You don’t know what you’re talking about. EVERY filesystem has fragementation, except when it has a built-in defragmenter (that’s what ext4 will have eventually I believe).
Also read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation
sudo e2fsck -nv /dev/sdaXXX | grep non-contiguous
Less than 5% – you’re fine.
There’s always a market for snake oil. Possibly not a large one, but certainly enough to turn a profit.
ext2/3/4 may not need defragmentation (until you break 90% capacity), but I’m willing to bet that there are enough Linux systems with VFAT or NTFS partitions that *do* need defragmenting.
I believe there is a need in Linux. As noted above, once your filesystems reach a certain capacity, fragmentation is a problem. I currently have 2-6TB filesystems that handle large amounts of relatively small files being written, deleted, and new files written constantly. A quota might prevent fragmentation, never looked in to it, but they definitely get fragmented because the application does not delete until the filesystem is full, then it just fills it up again with no regard to filesystem fragmentation.
The trick Diskeeper would need to overcome, is supporting the filesystems people are using. Home users are generally simple, but not always. In my case, we are using GFS. Other future filesystems we might need include NSS, ext3/4, btrfs.. Diskeeper would need to support these to be useful to me. We do not generally use EXT3 on the larger filesystems, which is what Diskeeper would likely support. They would also need to support online defrag, because as a 24×7 Healthcare facility, we can not take these systems down for a few minutes, much less several hours to defrag.
@Danny “They would also need to support online defrag, because as a 24×7 Healthcare facility, we can not take these systems down for a few minutes, much less several hours to defrag.”
Actually, that stuff is already available in the current versions of Diskeeper (since 2007 IIRC). We run Diskeeper 2009 Pro on a couple of XP machines at home and it’s background automatic defrag option is perfect: never had to schedule defrags, let alone shut down other applications just to defrag. It’s been install once and forget forever, with DK 2009.
Correct me if I’m wrong. But It seems that if diskeeper decides to go after the Linux market it’s going to go after the virtualization servers. In other word offering defrag for Windows running ontop of Linux. Is that accurate or am I just misreading?
As far as I’m aware Linux file systems don’t get fragmented and so never normally need to be defraged. In any case the benefits of defragging are minimal at best.
Where this might be of use is in the Linux-rescues-Windows-toolbox. Avira have already pushed out a free Linux based live CD version of their anti-virus software. I’ve found it quite useful for cleaning up Windows systems.
Now I don’t rip out the hard drive. I just pop in a CD, boot from that and Bobs a monkeys uncle. Half a million informative beeps later the sickly Windows machine is as clean as Avira can make it for free.
Aikiwolfie: Just checking — do you have a financial interest or any association with Avira?
Nope. No financial interests at all. I just like their free products. I’ve found them to be very useful and reliable. I was just trying to illustrate the benefits of having software run on one OS that is designed to benefit another OS.
Aikiwolfie: Thanks for sharing/clarifying. The VAR Guy will check out Avira, too.
After three years of moving massive movie files around pictures and ISO’s, DMG’s and such my MAC (MBP) is only 5% fragmented and that’s about as much fragmented as its going to get. I couldn’t believe it especially because I came from a life time of windows use, I switched like three years ago to a mac and never looked back. Anyway that’s just the way HFS works, no need to defrag a mac or linux.
Just some dude: The VAR Guy must concede — he’s been blogging non-stop on the same mac for nearly 3 years. And he has NO idea whether the hard drive has become fragmented…
[...] Btrfs and its benchmarks for the Linux kernel. I have also been reading other articles relating to file system maintenance. At this point, regarding the article on file system maintenance, I am going to have to say [...]
Diskeeper has always been a quality product when it comes to fragmentation on Windows based operating systems. The affects of fragmentation are real, and all of my systems have benefited from having Diskeeper on them. I also use Mac and Linux based systems. If there are performance gains to be had, then I would willingly use Diskeeper on them.
Every chunked FS (and most of them are this way) is fragmented, that is consequence of the fact that the files are split into smaller pieces, and that the fs ops are nondeterministic.
The disk defragmenter for ext3 and Mac HFS+? It is a white smoke compiled into binary for naive users. AFAIK, OSX defrags files smaller than 10MB on the fly, it is built into the system.
If you let defrag tool running all the time, the resources used by the tool itself is not worthy of the perfomance benefit. Not to mention that you can invest money into the hardware (larger hdd) that won’t be fragmented! Be smart!
Igor: Assuming your information is accurate, you’re officially smarter than The VAR Guy on the topic of defrag.
I am a little perplexed; – true Linux and Mac HFS+ both utilise journalling (non-fragmenting) file systems but as every unsuspecting user will still notice there is an ever increasing degree of disk thrashing that occurs on older Macs / Linux Workstations – this comes about as the files are gradually spread further across the platter (a natural effect from a journalling filesystem) – one of the most effective algorithms in Diskeeper is FFAST (a file access sequencing technology – I suggested to their support team many years ago) – now that takes the files you use most frequently and places them in the fastest region of the disk and others you almost never access and pops them in the slowest region and finally those that change the most in a third quick change zone – now once you do that the whole dynamic of disk access move to a whole new level – something even seasoned OSX Users will appreciate ! – I am looking forward to a whole new era of file performance heading our way – even the skeptics will concede !
Aurin: The VAR Guy begins and ends each day feeling perplexed. But thanks for tutoring our resident blogger a bit on Linux and Mac file systems.
Journaling has nothing to do with reducing fragmentation. It is a metadata integrity/safety measure.
The truth of the matter is that all file systems can and do suffer from fragmentation — the reason is simply due to physics and math. Different operating systems deal with this differently — Linux will do some intelligent pre-allocation where it can, Mac OS X does on-the-fly defragmentation of certain files (as long as they meet a few requirements), etc. NTFS is actually quite a powerful and advanced file system — the downside is that fragmentation is a bigger issue for NTFS than it is for other file systems. This does not mean that NTFS, or Windows, sucks.
A file system’s ability to decrease file and free space fragmentation is only one design criteria — there are many, many others to consider before you apply a term like “sucks” or “rocks” to it.
I wish people would stop talking with authority about topics they seem to know nothing about.
Tom: The VAR Guy appreciates the additional perspective. Our resident blogger covered Windows NT and NTFS in the 1990s for a range of IT publications.
But The VAR Guy must concede: he has no idea how Mac OS X and Linux file systems fragment, etc.
So in this case, the readers dominate the discussion while The VAR Guy reads comments and sips latte in Starbucks.
Thanks for offering your perspectives. Our resident blogger does appreciate them.
The VAR Guy seems like a cool dude. Tom was talking to others in this thread who speak with authority.
Interestingly enough, my ext4 FS on Jaunty (which I have been running since the release) is 0.1% fragmented on /, and 1.3% fragmented on /home, while /boot is 0.0% fragmented. Nice check though, but the need just hasn’t arisen yet (and with a 1.5TB drive – likely won’t be for a long while either).
Have a nice day.
Tom: The VAR Guy may seem like a cool dude but he’s actually, um, actually… you’re right.
Chuck: Looks like the percentages are in your favor for quite a while…
How is everyone checking the fragmentation percentage on their Mac and Linux systems?
[...] The first thing I tried to do was just clear some disk space and run the boot-camp wizard to set up a partition for Windows. Once again I ran into the problem of OS X not being able to reorganize the files on disk to create a contiguous partition. This doesn’t usually pose a problem with computers that have a disk defragmenting tool but of course OS X has some redimentary defrag technology built-in and thus the notion that “Mac’s don’t need to be defragged”. I call shenanigans. [...]