Symantec Norton Utilities

Symantec's Norton Utilities software suite includes a program called Speed Disk that performs disk defragmentation. In Symantec's recent release of Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95, Symantec changed from one method of defragmentation to another. These two methods are shown in Figure 5.5 (based on program's screen illustrations).

  

Figure 5.5: Disk Optimization in Symantec Norton Utilities

Speed Disk allows you to customize the optimization that it performs. Some of these options are:[Cor98b]

• You can have Speed Disk move all disk directories to the front of the disk. [Cor98b]
• You can specify a list of files to be put ahead of other files as well as specify a list of files to be put after most files and before the disk free space. [Cor98b]
• You can specify a list of files to be put at the very end of the disk. [Cor98b]
• You can have Speed Disk sort all files by last access date, then put frequently accessed files toward the beginning of the disk and frequently modified files toward the end of the disk. [Cor98b]
• You can specify files you don't want Speed Disk to move. [Cor98b]

Symantec also makes a version of the Norton Utilities software suite for Windows NT, currently version 2.0. In contrast to the MS-DOS and Windows 3.x/95 versions of Norton Utilities, it is possible to run Speed Disk multiple times and still have some disk fragmentation. Speed Disk in the Windows NT version of Norton Utilities can be set to run repeatedly until stopped. [Cor98b]

One reason why is that Windows NT does not allow applications to move directory entries on FAT partitions and does not allow applications to move NTFS metadata on NTFS partitions. As a result, Speed Disk will leave them where they were created, which may be all over the disk. Another issue is that Windows NT reserves sixteen kilobytes of free disk space just before each file to allow files to grow by up to sixteen kilobytes without fragmenting them. However this results in fragmentation of free space. [Cor98b]

According to Symantec, these are the types of files Speed Disk will not move:

• open system files [Cor98b]
• the Windows NT swap file (PAGEFILE.SYS) [Cor98b]
• directory entries [Cor98b]
• the MFT, volume bitmap, and other metadata [Cor98b]
• the contents of the Nprotect folder. This folder was created by Norton Utilities to hold files deleted by the user. [Cor98b]