Defrag or not?
Submitted by Salvo Giuffrida on November 3, 2007 - 1:12pm.
What consequences can have defragging a LivePC, expecially on the streaming functionality of the LivePC Engine? I mean, do you stream only the changes between subsequent releases of a LivePC basing on the differences between (virtual) hard disk sectors, right? If that's the case, when one defrags a disk, a lot of disk sectors, even if they didn't change, will change position, so the Engine will see them as 'modified', and so will stream a lot of unnecessary data, right?
Yes, that is correct. You
Yes, that is correct. You should avoid running defrag on "shallow" updates as it will cause the updates to become quite a bit larger. It is still advisable to run defrag before publishing the first version of the LivePC or when doing a deep package. Also, it is imperative to zero the empty parts of the disk after defrag and before packaging, using SDelete on Windows or "
dd if=/dev/zero of=/foo bs=65536; rm /foo" on Linux. Otherwise, the LivePC will waste space storing duplicate parts of the same file.-John