What is it doing?

[GLykos]

Separately reported inconsistency in the handling of similar drives queued for defragging in sequence.  The defrag pattern on the second drive is hugely different than the first.  Repeating the same operation on the second drive, this time by itself, yields the expected results very similar to the first of the two drives, and very different from the second drive when second in consecutive processing order.  Why?

Estimated time to complete, which appears to be a relatively new addition to Defraggler, is erratic.  For grins, turned Defraggler loose on a WD 4TB passport drive.  Estimated time to complete was "> 1 day".  Turned [competition product] loose on it, and the defrag was completed in a couple of hours or so.  Can't speak to the comparative quality of the operation, but at least their algorithm comes up with a in-this-world plan and execution.  In a separate case, ran Defraggler on a Garmin drive in USB mode, and it reported 10 minutes to complete, then after a bit jumped it to several hours, and it does this consistently.  Also routinely, time-to-complete gets reported as 1 minute, then can sit there for many minutes until completion.

See that Defraggler jumped from 4MB at 2.21 to 6MB at 2.22.  What drove the huge increase?  Just curious.

Regards,
George

 

Edited June 9, 2018 by Nergal
removed competition software name

[GLykos]

Would like to apologize to the development team and the forum readers for my moment of pique - the negative tone was unwarranted.  Part of my initial reaction was due to disappointment in the nature of the unexpected and unsubtle issues encountered;  part was due to wondering if the Piriform products, long an industry standard, are perhaps tending to become over-embellished at the expense of their traditional efficient, effective, reliable core functionality and ease of use.  Any perceived issues are my problem and no one else's - sorry.  Availability of the product suite absolutely continues to be appreciated and valued.

Sincerely,
George Lykos

 

[Andavari]

As for the time remaining being all over the place I'd personally just ignore it because how could it possibly know.

I think it would be better off just showing a progress bar with the running time counting up, and then after it finishes it could simply display exactly how long it took. That would more-or-less equal no guessing and wouldn't give the impression of it will finish in 10 minutes (or however long) which in reality could be significantly longer.

[GLykos]

Just received an e-mail reply from Piriform Support suggesting that I would be hearing in parallel from a forum moderator, which has not yet happened, and that there was nothing untoward in the program behaviors that I described above.  To me, there are two very clear issues which are not being recognized.

Regarding defrag behavior varying with the situation:  I defraggled two identical USB drives with almost identical content sequentially;  the second drive showed a dramatically different pattern than the first.  The second drive was then defraggled individually;  it now showed a pattern relatively identical to the first.  Something appears off, and it is not subtle.  If helpful, I can run a series of tests and do screen grabs to illustrate this, but would wonder if the development team has done any serious testing in this respect with the sequential functionality, and whether this is in fact indicating a latent and perhaps more general undetected program issue.

Regarding time-to-complete estimates:  It is unreasonable for a defraggle operation to analyze a situation, embark on defragmentation while projecting an hour or two to complete, then not too long later, flip to a ">1 day" projection to completion.  In a similar but less dramatic vein, it is odd for a defraggle operation nearing completion (or so,  announcing 1 minute remaining) and then spend another 15+ minutes (subjective estimate, but I can starting keeping records if needed).

Perhaps in your world these are don't-cares - that's your call.  My interest is only to get the observations accurately identified and recognized in the interest of potentially contributing to the quality of Piriform software with field feedback.

Cheers!

 

[login123]

Fwiw, I have used a number of defrag, recovery, and drive wiping softwares that require a long time to complete.  
Oddly, none that I remember can predict time to completion very well.
They all seem to jump around like you describe. No idea why.