Norton Speed Disk 5.1
At the time of testing, Symantec's most recent Speed Disk release was version 5.1, which the company had just released to market. I received Speed Disk's server and workstation versions on separate CD-ROMs. Speed Disk runs on Win2K Server, Win2K Pro, and NT 4.0 SP3 or later. Speed Disk doesn't currently support NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (WTS) or Win2K Server Terminal Services. To defragment Windows Me and Win9x systems, you need a separate Symantec product—Norton Utilities or Norton SystemWorks. Speed Disk supports NTFS, FAT16, and FAT32 file systems. The Server CD-ROM contains a Getting Started Guide, User Guide, and Implementation Guide, all in PDF format.
Speed Disk's defragmentation approach is different from the approaches of the other two products I tested. Speed Disk doesn't use the MoveFile API. Instead, Symantec has developed a proprietary method for moving all files while the OS is active. A Symantec engineer described the company's defragmentation method as a push-pull approach that continually synchronizes its activity with the NT file system to ensure data integrity. The obvious advantage to this approach is that it eliminates the need to reboot a system and perform an offline defragmentation pass. The disadvantage is that OS changes could potentially render Speed Disk unusable until Symantec revises the code to accommodate the OS changes. Apparently, Symantec thinks that the performance and usability enhancements that its programmatic approach provides are worth this risk. So far, the gamble seems to have been worthwhile. However, because of code changes in WTS, Speed Disk doesn't currently support that platform. At the time of testing, Speed Disk wouldn't run on a Win2K system running Terminal Services.
Like the other products, Speed Disk has a unique approach to file placement. Whereas Diskeeper performs no specific file placement outside its Frag Guard feature and PerfectDisk has a file-placement strategy that prevents future fragmentation, Speed Disk uses an involved scheme to prevent future fragmentation and enhance disk performance.
Speed Disk organizes files into multiple zones. The placement strategy is similar to PerfectDisk's, except that Speed Disk considers performance in its placement of certain zones. To accommodate fast access, the software places your most frequently accessed files toward the outside of the disk, as close to the read/write head as possible. Speed Disk places the pagefile even closer to the head, and the metadata and the MFT reserved zone take their traditional positions at the extreme outside edge of the disk. Speed Disk then places its most frequently changed files—the files that are most likely to grow—toward the logical center of the disk, followed by contiguous free space so that new files won't be fragmented. Between these bands of grouped files, Speed Disk clears small sections of free space (i.e., slack space) to accommodate limited growth. Finally, Speed Disk places infrequently accessed files closest to the disk spindle—theoretically, the disk's slowest portion.
Speed Disk's strategy is complex, and Symantec's detractors claim that you'll realize little measurable performance gain from file placement. Nonetheless, Speed Disk pursues its strategy vigorously. Graphical representations of defragmented partitions clearly show the strategy in action.
Installation, Deployment, and Central Management
I used Speed Disk's installation wizard to install the product. The process proceeded smoothly. After the required reboot, I checked for new services and found the Speed Disk service running in the context of the local machine account. When I launched Speed Disk, two processes started: nopdb.exe, the defragmentation engine, and sdnt.exe, the GUI executable. Each process consumed 5MB to 8MB of system resources during a manual defragmentation run. Speed Disk also supports command-line execution, which eliminates the GUI overhead and facilitates batch processing.
Of the three tested products, Speed Disk has my least favorite GUI. Although the interface is certainly colorful and provides pie charts to illustrate data, it provides only limited information and doesn't let you save text-based reports, as the other products' GUIs do. Speed Disk does log detailed information to the Application event log, although Diskeeper and PerfectDisk still do a better job in that area. Figure 5 shows Speed Disk's administrative GUI. The interface provides impressive details about free-space fragmentation—a feature absent from the other products—but the interface doesn't specifically report on the MFT, MFT reserved zone, pagefile, or directories.
The Analysis view doesn't show a bitmap representation of the partition. To access a graphical representation, you must go to the Optimization Map view and launch a defragmentation pass. Speed Disk then displays a bitmap of tiny color-coded blocks. The legend for deciphering the bitmap contains no fewer than 17 colors, some of which are difficult to distinguish from others. You can change the legend's colors by clicking an item and selecting a different color. Only after I changed the colors and noticed the changes in the bitmap image was I able to make sense of the legend and its references to the graphical display.
You can distribute Speed Disk manually, with a third-party deployment tool, or in conjunction with SMS. (The Speed Disk Server CD-ROM contains a package- definition file that you can use with SMS.) Another deployment option is to use NSC, which you'll find on the Speed Disk 5.1 Server CD-ROM. NSC provides a framework specifically for managing Symantec network products. Choosing the NSC method will depend mostly on whether you've invested in another remote-deployment or management application. Other management applications can perform most of NSC's management tasks, but if you don't use a deployment or management application, NSC's inclusion as part of the defragmentation utility is a bonus.
NSC installation is more involved than the installation of a defragmentation utility. The process required that I have MMC and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 4.0 or later on my system. The installation proceeded smoothly and set up NSC, along with other related components for performing live updates and managing events that Symantec products generate. I then installed the required Norton Agent on all the network systems on which I wanted to deploy Speed Disk. Next, I used NSC to create a job to install Speed Disk on target machines. (I used the Speed Disk Install Package provided as part of NSC.) I launched the job, and the deployment process finished without incident.
I used the MMC NSC Console snap-in to schedule defragmentation passes with Speed Disk. From within the console, I right-clicked the Jobs node in the control tree, chose New Job, and named the job. Next, I chose Norton Speed Disk Install Package from the Software distribution package list box. Finally, in the Browse for Targets window, which Figure 6 shows, I selected the systems I wanted to schedule. After I completed the scheduling process, the jobs launched as I expected on the selected target machines.
NSC also lets you audit target machines for information about whether Speed Disk is installed, whether Speed Disk has ever run, whether an optimization has run in the past 4 days, and whether partitions have exceeded the fragmentation thresholds that you've defined. Although NSC has a steep learning curve, its deployment and management functionality is a definite enhancement that makes NSC worth your effort.
Performance
In my tests, Speed Disk's consistently solid performance distinguished the product from its competitors. I started Speed Disk on the 8.4GB SQL Server database, and the product finished the job with impressive results, although the defragmentation took twice as long as a Diskeeper run. When I moved on to the next system, which hosted the near-capacity data partition, Speed Disk struggled—just as the other products did. This particular disk was the anomaly, however; Speed Disk turned in good results on the remaining two data partitions, posting particularly fine numbers in free-space consolidation. Speed Disk performed admirably on the system partitions, achieving nearly complete defragmentation in good time.
One problem I noticed during testing: Speed Disk consistently broke a previously contiguous MFT into at least two fragments. On two occasions, the software divided the MFT into several fragments. I called Symantec to troubleshoot this problem, and an engineer told me that Speed Disk commonly breaks the MFT into a few fragments in the process of consolidating files on a partition. He also stated that Speed Disk's file-placement strategy always causes the MFT to fragment into two pieces. This explanation struck me as odd. However, Speed Disk did a good job at overall file defragmentation, so an additional MFT fragment didn't overly concern me.
In my performance testing, Speed Disk posted respectable results and—as a bonus—didn't require a reboot to consolidate the system files. The lack of a required reboot might not be a big deal to 9-to-5 organizations, but it appeals tremendously to operations that require high availability and don't like to shut down servers unless absolutely necessary. Remember that the performance of any defragmentation utility will suffer on a busy server. Therefore, high-availability shops still need to schedule defragmentation passes to occur during off-peak hours and adjust performance expectations accordingly.