NI's products cause severe fragmentation

[JoeTestEngineer]

The log from disk keeper(See attached file) reports that NI's product have produced 2700 fragments in 163 Mb All remaining applications produce less than 100 fragments in about 2MB. How can I fix this problem other than uninstalling NI's products?

Thanks,
Steve

[Shiner]

I doubt that NI products are to blame, its more likely that your HDD was fragmented or running out of space before you installed them.
The OS can only put the files where there is space and if it was fragmented before hand, the resulting copied or transferred files would be fragmented too.

The NI files that you list are not in control of where they end up on the file system.

How much free space do you have on the drive?
Once you defrag it once, there should not be a problem. If you don't have a lot of free space (I think its less than 20-30%), defrag has trouble moving files around and it may take multiple passes.

You could deinstall, defrag then reinstall, or, move the offending directorys onto a network server, defrag, then move them back. This would help
make then contigious.

Regards

Chris

[JoeTestEngineer]

I have done this ("deinstall, defrag then reinstall")several times now (That works), but shortly there after the same result develops. I have three PC's all with different OS's (NT, 2000 and XP PRO). One PC has over 100 gig free space (80% free space). DiskKeeper, the Defrag Tool, cannot fix NI's products for some reason. Notice tha attached defrag report. No other product shows the same problem. The PC that the attached report is on has 1.4 gig free of 4 gig (35%).

Why can't "Diskeeper" or the supplied XP defrag tool fix NI's products?

Steve

[Shiner]

Most of those files have been marked as Excess Allocation.

This is from http://www.execsw.co.uk/home/html/home/diskeeper/faq.htm#q7
---------
What does "Excess Allocation" mean?

The file is one that is being held open by the kernel. In addition it is being written and rewritten on a regular basis by the kernel. At some point in its lifetime, it WAS large enough to require 2 extents' worth of allocation. However, since then it was rewritten from the beginning with less data AND NEVER CLOSED. Since the file is being held open, NTFS figures it might have more data written into it at some time in the future and doesn't release the extra allocated clusters...leaving them assigned to this file for possible future expansion. The excess clusters will be r
eleased when the file is closed, which, unfortunately, will be the next reboot.
---------

I believe Exec are working on a fix for this...

As to why when you have rebooted several times it has not cleared, I don't know.

Also, since these are NI files, they are not in use all that often, and I don't think you'll notice too much performance issues.