Defrag problem.

[vdmeer2]

I use O&O Defrag on my FSX drive (Raptor 150 GB) to Defrag on Name. This usually gives me a drive with a zero point something defrag level. I recently changed to Vista SP1 (from XP) and now my defrag levels do not come down lower than approx 10%. O&O says that this due to NTFS metadata files. I also came across (on another drive) a file (D:\System Volume Information\{069f8062-04ca-11dd-b97c-00038a000015}{3808876b-c176-4e48-b7ae-04046e6cc752}) which has 2,331,342 (!) clusters.
What are these files, are they Vista related and can I do something with them so that O&O can do its (good) work?

[xxmikexx]

vdmeer2,

It has been my experience that even on XP, O&O is not very good at defragging the Windows metafiles.

My advice is to get in touch with the vendor of PerfectDisk and put your Vista metafiles question them. My prediction is that they will tell you that they do a complete job on Vista regarding the metafiles, though I don't know this for a fact.

However, the last time I looked at PerfectDisk (Version 8) it did not have a defrag-sort-by-name option. For that reason I use both products -- PD8 for the metafiles and then O&O for complete/NAME. (I'm running XP.)

However, before the /NAME I do a /SPACE defrag. The reason for this is that it gives the /NAME sort the maximum amount of contiguous free space in which to put its temporary versions of the files being defragmented and moved.

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P.S. "System Volume Information" is probably the System Restore database. It certainly is on XP. However, I have no information regarding why those peculiar folder names are being used on VISTA. They do not appear in XP, at least I've never seen them.

It may be that the folder names are actually GUIDs -- globally unique identifers -- generated by a special Microsoft algorithm that guarantees to generate a name that is absolutely unique among all the computers in the world that run modern Microsoft operating systems.

I hope this helps,