Hello! I read in a TechNet blog here ... ...that there would be improvements to decrease time to defragment as well as increased defragmentation effectiveness in Longhorn ( 2k8 ). However, I am experiencing some difficulty in discerning whether these have been implemented up to this point in the beta program. Were these changes already implemented in a previous beta iteration? Are they newly implemented in Beta 3?

Hi The large improvements to Defrag/CHKDSKis that the filesystem is selfhealing; as bad files are found it will mark these and run a defrag and or chkdsk operation on these files and sectors only without the need to reboot you machine and run full defrag which could take hours. Take a look at Mark Russinovich presentation on kerner updates at WinHec: http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0705/30024/Russinovich_WinHec_MBR.asx- Self healing NTFS starts at about 21 minutes into the presentation. Brjann

Thank you for the link to that presentation, the data on the self-healing filesystem was interesting and informative.However, what Russinovich is discussing in that presentation is not fragmentation of the files on the disk-- he's talking about on-the-fly Chkdsk operations, which handle file/system corruptions. Fragmentation Corruption.Does your answer indicate that there were not, in fact, changes to how defragmentation is performed in 2K8?

Yeah, I like the self-healing stuff as well, I know it didn't quite match your question but as you say it is informative and good to know as chkdsk on larger disks can take a long time as well. The Defragmentation is not undergoing major changes inWindows Server 2008compared to Windows Server 2003.The defrag process has an updatedalgorithm and we should be seeing some improvements like Defragmentation will use Low priority I/O. This will make sure that if defragmentation is in process the system is still responsive and other application do not experience unnecessarily degraded I/O performance. Defrag cancellation will be more responsive. One of the major problems with defragmentation in W2K3 is the inability to cancel defragmentation while a large file is being defragmented. This behavior had the side effects of blocking or significantly delaying system shutdown and creating the impression that defrag cancellation itself is slow or it does not work. In Windows Server 2008, defragmentation of large files will be done in small chunks and defrag will be cancelable after each. Brjann