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I remember in MS-DOS 6.22 that Defrag had a GUI that showed its progress and how it was moving files. It wasn't there in Windows XP and I can only assume that it wasn't in Windows 95, 98, 2000 either (I'm not sure though). Even now in Windows 11, we are still presented with a version that shows a progress bar and a percentage and, in my opinion, not that efficient.

Stephen Kitt
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user10191234
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    "not that efficient" - what do you mean by 'efficient'? – Bruce Abbott Feb 01 '23 at 07:32
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    Windows 9x had a GUI defrag utility with a detailed view, actually. Not the same one as MS-DOS, but it was there. – user3840170 Feb 01 '23 at 07:35
  • I run it to completion then after restarting and running it again, it runs again for some time, although it should run minimally since it optimized it moments ago. – user10191234 Feb 01 '23 at 07:36
  • @user3840170 That's why I said that I wasn't sure. – user10191234 Feb 01 '23 at 07:37
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    @user10191234 it still needs to analyse the file system completely to determine that there’s nothing to do, so it can’t run “minimally” unless by minimally you mean just that. It can’t (usefully) remember that it just finished defragging in a previous run. – Stephen Kitt Feb 01 '23 at 08:34
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    With the massive increases in size and speed of hard drives, I'd venture to say that such a graphic display wouldn't be very informative. Similar to how old vacuum tube computers had little lights to indicate which bits were set in the registers, which would be a useless blur by now. – Arthur Kalliokoski Feb 01 '23 at 11:25
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    re large drives - in the dim and distant past, I wrote a 'disk fragmentation display' program that used the file system allocation bitmap (1 bit per disk block) directly as a display bitmap (1 bit per pixel). That ceased to be useful as soon as there were more blocks on a disk than spots on a display! – dave Feb 01 '23 at 12:54
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    If you're interested in getting a visual indication of how fragmented your NTFS drive is (or just find it interesting to look at) on a modern PC, consider the SysInternals tool DiskView: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/diskview – Danya02 Feb 01 '23 at 15:42
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    I agree with @ArthurKalliokoski. If you have a 20 MB hard drive divided into 1 KB allocation blocks, that's 20 480 blocks, small enough to dedicate several screen pixels to each one. But if you have a billion allocation blocks on the disk, you just don't have enough pixels to represent them directly, even on today's higher-resolution monitors. – dan04 Feb 01 '23 at 17:01
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    I always thought the Windows 9x Defrag GUI was kind of relaxing to watch. – Hannover Fist Feb 01 '23 at 18:33
  • When I was maintaining PCs it was very useful. I could sit in front of the user's PC and appear as though I was both doing something and understanding what was being done. It was a pleasant break from the more stressful parts of the job. – chasly - supports Monica Feb 01 '23 at 19:11
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    This was not the only thing that was lost after around 6.22 ... I recall the file manager suddenly being unable to show all the files in the file system in one listing which I found immensely useful at the time. This was my first introduction to a new version losing functionality over a previous one. Also the animation by @HannoverFist shows that it can't be the inability of the screen to show that many blocks because it's clear there is a scroll bar into a larger area. – Andy Feb 02 '23 at 01:18
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    @HannoverFist Right, and when you used DriveSpace compression, defrag also had another mode with multicolored rectangles of varying widths representing individual files, which was even more of a pleasure to watch. The second half of this video shows what I'm talking about. – TooTea Feb 02 '23 at 11:07
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    Actually, IIRC, the reason was because the disks became too large and could no longer be practically (or efficiently) represented with that old interface. I had used it myself on some very large (for the time) disks before it disappeared and it was not useful at all. And much larger disks became available on the newer versions of Windows at about that same time. – RBarryYoung Feb 02 '23 at 13:46
  • @Hannover Fist - Windows 9X Defrag GUI on a widescreen display...??? – CitizenRon Feb 02 '23 at 16:11
  • Nevermind. I took a look and while the Windows 9X time didn't see widescreen displays yet, I should have known that in the "Retrocomputing" space, it's been figured out how to do it. – CitizenRon Feb 02 '23 at 16:23
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    The question gets something wrong: Windows XP had the map. The map was removed in Vista. – user71659 Feb 03 '23 at 01:20
  • @user71659 Yes and no, what I was referring to is the GUI that was posted in other comments. In XP, the map is a glorified progress bar. – user10191234 Feb 03 '23 at 04:41
  • @user10191234 The map in XP shows the same thing as DOS except its scaled over one screen width. The paid version of defrag, Diskeeper, gave you multiple lines, exactly like DOS. – user71659 Feb 03 '23 at 06:23
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    @user71659 that review shows Diskeeper 6.0, which was released after Windows 2000; but Diskeeper 4.0 has a similar display. – Stephen Kitt Feb 03 '23 at 06:55

1 Answers1

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The “official” answers from Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter FAQ (first published in 2006):

The new interface seems “dumbed down.” Why remove all the detail?

Interestingly enough, one of the biggest and consistent complaints we had from users[...]in the past was that a vast majority of them had no idea what the detailed fragmentation statistics they saw meant. The Windows XP graphical view also had some limitations and inaccuracies that prevented it from being included in Windows Vista[...]

Why was the defrag progress indicator removed?

Part of the problem with the Windows XP defrag tool was that percent complete was not accurate or meaningful. Depending on the phase of defrag, 1% of progress could take from several seconds to minutes, which made the progress indicator highly unreliable. The difficulty here is that since defrag is a multi-pass process[...]there is no way to accurately predict when defrag will complete[...] While I agree that having no progress is bad, misleading progress I believe is worse[...]

In short, the old UI was seen as “overly technical”, and the progress bar was bad at estimating progress.

I also think that the growing size of hard drives was the major contributing factor to the UI change. When MS-DOS 6.0 with defrag was released back in 1993, the FAT16 file system inherently restricted disks to having 65 536 allocation clusters. (The maximum cluster size was 32 KB, giving a maximum overall disk size of 2 GB. It was still common for disks to be under 100 MB.) This made it technically feasible for a UI to devote an entire screen pixel (or even 2 or 4) to showing the allocated/unallocated status of individual clusters.

Today, with NTFS, it's common for a disk to have a billion or more allocation blocks, and monitors generally aren't big enough to show the allocation bitmap directly.

As mentioned in @Danya02's comment, if you really want to see a graphical representation of your disk allocation, you can use Sysinternals' DiskView program. It works around the “too many pixels” problem by using a scroll pane. And rendering it is s-l-o-w. So I can understand Microsoft's decision not to include it in their standard “Optimize Drives” tool.

Sep Roland
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dan04
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    Nice find! This FAQ is specifically about the changes between XP and Vista; in relation to the question, that’s mostly the progress information, the visualisation of the defragmentation process had been removed before XP. Funnily enough, the progress bar was restored in Windows 7! – Stephen Kitt Feb 01 '23 at 18:29
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    I don't think cluster count is necessarily an issue. If I remember correctly, DOS version of Defrag represented multiple clusters as single visible block. If you had bigger disk, there was roughly same amount of blocks shown, but each block represented more clusters. – user694733 Feb 02 '23 at 09:19
  • The fact is, the GUI doesn't actually have to display REAL data. Most users have no idea what that is actually is, so I wouldn't be surprised if the GUI just displayed a randomized animation, most users wouldn't even know... but then technical people would complain about it, so add a note that it is an "animation" and not actual status indicator and you basically would've solved this problem. – Nelson Feb 03 '23 at 01:16
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    @user694733 Although true, you'll end up reading and writing the same block for an extended period, since the ratio of drive blocks to GUI blocks would be some huge amount like one to thousands or even tens of thousands. – Nelson Feb 03 '23 at 01:18
  • @Nelson: Perhaps a more humor-minded tool developer could introduce an animation for "I defragged my zebra." – dan04 Feb 03 '23 at 01:44
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    The DOS utility didn't show individual clusters. Check the lower right, it would say 1 block = xx clusters. – user71659 Feb 03 '23 at 06:24
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    There's a politically sensitive backstory with defrag. The 2000-XP version was a lite version of Diskeeper, which ran into issues due to the company's affiliation with the Church of Scientology. Microsoft made "improvements" and API changes to justify its replacement in Vista. – user71659 Feb 03 '23 at 06:32