I agree. I just had to go back and reread the first page to find out what they were using.
"And now we want to compare HDDs using the defragmentation tool integrated into Windows XP."
Also, is it just me or is there not a "Testbed" page?

There are a lot of defragmentation utilities out there, but the objective of this article wasn't to compare all of them side by side. A detailed discussion of different defragmentation tools will require more time and a totally different approach.

As we said in the Conclusion, we will continue discussing the NCQ efficiency during defragmentation with one of the commenrical tools. We will also consider the possibility of comparing the existing defragmentation utilities and their efficiency.

NCQ boosts performance when reading and writing successive clusters and not random ones, when the commands can be queued if necessary. Defragmentation is performed in this particular way that is why we could theoretically expect a performance improvement. Some of our fellow testers claim they've seen improvement up to tens of percents.

Aleksey, I think your understanding of NCQ may be a little confused. Rather than re-explaining it myself I suggest you check out the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing

With this in mind it should be obvious why NCQ doesn't boost performance when defragmenting a single partition--all operations are performed sequentially rather than interleaved, because the defragmentation functions have to maintain additional transaction journals in order for the data's safety to be guaranteed (the NTFS driver always journals metadata but only journals the data itself under special circumstances).

Anyway, it might be possible to see some benefit if you defragment multiple partitions on the same drive simultaneously because then it's possible for queue depth to become greater than 1. Of course under ordinary circumstances it would be pretty stupid to do such a thing but it might be interesting for benchmarking purposes--you will need Diskkeeper or some other such product as the built-in defragmenter doesn't support multiple simultaneous operations. Sysinternals contig could be used to make a FC-test script I guess.

Incidentally you don't say how many times you repeated each measurement, so I assume they were all done once? I'd rather see three sets of repeats and times measured in seconds, not minutes:seconds, please.

Otherwise, good review--worthwhile results in respect of the different drives though I find the NCQ results not exactly surprising. :)

Exactly. For NCQ to have any effect, the defragmenter would need to issue simulatenous disk requests first.

Sorry, we don't have any SSD in our lab now, but we will definitely check them out ASAP

Not only does 2 passes with the default defragger improve results, but also the windows prefetching mechanism seems flawed, perhaps geared to ancient setups when drives were different and much smaller?
Anyway if a HD gets full near capacity it helps to remove layout.ini from %system%/windows/prefetch, it makes the drive boot much faster and it prevents the infamous missing trayicons bug I discovered.

I meant to say remove layout.ini before a defrag, it is supposedly used by defraggers to make the most used programs be oriented on HD's in such a way that they can be accessed quicker, but for some reason it seems not to work as expected and do the opposite in many cases.
Note that layout.ini is constantly updated/newly created so if you remove it it will re-appear after no longer than a few days, sometimes after minutes of normal windows use.
Perhaps some site should experiment with that?

You never defragment the filesystem because your filesystem can only be defragmented by deleting everything and restoring from a backup. No wonder you don't understand much about it or why it is necessary for some usage scenarios and not others.

For the record, NTFS also implements all the anti-fragmentation features that extfs (for example) does, but for single-user applications performance characteristics are much more likely to be dominated by sequential access than random access, whereas in a multi-user mode it's the other way around. Since Linux until recently was rarely used by only single users, sequential access wasn't important enough to bother implementing a defragmenter.

Maybe since you evidently do use Linux in a single-user mode, maybe it's time you got your head out of the sand and started thinking about such things rather than posting worthless uninformed flames like the above.

Of course we understand the nature, purposes and effects of Native Command Queuing. Initially some other resources published their measurements, where NCQ enabled drives leave the competition in dust, so we decided to repeat the experiment in most matching conditions.

Now we prepare the second part of the article, with more hard disk drives and a commercial defragger (PerfectDisk 8.0) in test, so don't miss!