B.A.D. bad?
10 messages in this thread
Has anyone out there had any problems with the B.A.D. disk optimizer
program? I have the latest version and used it to optimize my Amiga 3000
50 meg hard drive under the latest version of Operating System 2……..
….The result was a terribly scrambled hard-drive which had to be
reformatted in order to bring it into working order again. Fortunately, I
had backed up the whole thing with Quarterback, a program that served me
very well (thank goodness!).
I realize that hard-drive scrambling is a real risk with a disk optimizer
program, but I was terribly disappointed that my rather dull and standard
Amiga system seemed to have completely stumped the B.A.D. program. During
hard-drive processing, it seemed to work just fine. When it was finished,
all seemed well…until I tried to actually use my hard-drive.
Has anyone else noted similiar problems? In retrospect, I have my doubts
that this is even a worthwhile program, even if it DOES work…. After
all….it would seem that an alternative method of optimizing a hard drive
would be to simply back up the drive, reformat it and then replace the
files, using the back-up program.
Calls to technical support have gone unanswered, though I am continuing to
try.
Any thoughts?
Steven –
I use QB Tools to unfrag my drives. And while the backup-format-restore
sequence _should_ do a decent unfrag job, it doesn't seem to. Over the last
couple of days I switched my system from 3 seperate drives to one big
drive. After restoring from QB, I used QB Tools to unfrag, and the stats it
showed were surprising. For example, on one drive with 900+ files, after
the restore (to a blank, formatted partition) it showed 700+ files
fragmented! Either FFS isn't doing something right, or QB Tools' stats
aren't right. I sure wouldn't have expected those numbers.
Anyway, for grins I ran QB Tools unfrag on a partition it had just
worked on (after reboot) and it still showed no fragmentation, so at least
it's consistent.
Harry
It is interesting that your calls have been unanswered. When I sent
M.V.Micro my upgrade fee in Feburary I sent an extra $20 for a pre-release
version of a program called My Diary "due out mid-March." I got the
upgrade but no Diary program. I caller during the summer and I was assured
the program would be finished in a couple weeks. Nothing yet.
Steven,
I just ran B.A.D. over my Workbench: partition (5 Meg) yesterday, and
it worked just fine. I have no idea why it wouldn't work for you. At
least you had the good sense to do a full backup before you ran the
optimizer. I'm currently backing up my Usr: partition (33 Meg), in
preparation to run B.A.D. over it. We'll see how it likes the larger
partition. BTW, how much memory do you have? I know B.A.D. is pretty
memory hungry, that might be a problem.
People have noted problems with *all* of the disk optimizers. I
don't know why they seem to be so fragile on the Amiga. I haven't heard
that this sort of program has these problems on PClones. As for whether or
not these programs are worthwhile, that's up to you. A full backup and
restore will defragment your disk, but it won't shuffle the directory
structures around, to speed up file access time. With a fast hard drive
and SCSI host adaptor, that may not be much of a consideration, however.
If you use floppies a lot, you will appreciate a program like B.A.D.,
though; at least, I do. B.A.D. also made quite a noticeable difference on
my old Rodime RO650 (The Harddrive From Hell!), which is a *very* slow
device (85ms access time). So for me, it's a reasonable program.
Just my $0.05 worth. (Inflation, don't'cha know…)
–dds (dales@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM)
Whappeta-whappeta-Whap!
Dale, how do the optomizers shuffle the data better than just not
fragmenting? Isn't just one file after the next in its entirety the best
arrangement? How much would you quantify it as, umm…how much faster
overall (than just sequential order).
Thanx for the help,
Paul
–pt–not seattle– 😉
Some disk optimizers do several things. B.A.D. for instance, will not only
defragment files, but will also rearrange the files for fastest access via
either a WB interface (icons) or a CLI interface. For instance, if you
specified a WB interface, it would put all the '.info' files in a directory
right after another on the disk, so that the icon reading would go quickly.
In the IBM world I once used one (Mace?) that allowed you to specify the
exact order of the rearrangement of the files, if you wished. That way you
could put program and overlay files together, or text and image files (for
a DTP project, for instance). I don't think any amiga disk optimizer has
this flexibility though.
The speed difference between a defragged drive and a horribly fragmented
one is astounding.
I've always wondered why there wasn't a DOS routine that would allocate
contiguous disk space of a specified size (if it existed). You can do it
for RAM, but as far as I know with the disk if you start writing a 10 meg
file, you take the first 10meg DOS gives you, whether it is contiguous or
not. I think.
–jp–seattle–
Paul,
De-fragmenting the disk does indeed make access faster. Mostly in
reading long files, but also in scanning directories. As I understand it,
a program like BAD will put the #?.info files at the beginnings of their
various directories, thus making the icons show up right away. I believe
they rearrange the directory structures, too, so that the disk doesn't have
to seek very much to read them. (The directories, that is.) You definately
want the files sequential, but I think that the biggest speedup is supposed
to come from the directory restructure. (I'm by no means an expert on this
subject, so take this for what it's probably worth…)
I don't have any quantitative measurements for you, I'm afraid. My
hard drives are perceptably faster, especially the Rodime. However, since
the Rodime is where all my downloads go, and where T: is, it gets pretty
well fragged right away. BADs most obvious speedup is on floppies. I
would guess a factor of three faster. Again, this is purely subjective.
The only way to measure it would be to make a well-fragged disk, measure
the time for various directory and file reads, then BAD the disk, and
repeat the exact same measurements. (Though I speak of BAD here, I imagine
that any of the commercial optimizers work in much the same way. BAD is the
only one I have any experience with, however, so it's the one I talk
about.)
Methinks I'm starting to babble here. Time for bed…
–dds (dales@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM)
Whappeta-whappeta-Whap!
Paul –
THis doesn't answer your question ddirectly, but….
When I first added my 210-meg quantum to the old 40-meg, I made 5 42-meg
partitions. I then copies ALL of the 40 to TWO different partitions, and
ran BAD on one and QuarterBack Tools on the other to defrag and optimize.
Afterwards, both came up about equally fast on the workbench or in
DiskMaster, but the QBT-optimized partition did so nearly silently, while I
heard more hard-disk activity on the BAD-optimized partition.
Since I have had no problems with the latest version of QBT, I haven't
upgraded BAD to IT'S latest version.
. . . . . JimDoc