Simming La Vida Loca

A short interview with Robert Ferraro, creator of UltimateDefrag.

Welcome, Robert! Do you sim? Any aviation experience in the real world?
I’ve been using flight-sims since 1984. That year I discovered SubLOGIC’s Flight Simulator II on my roommate’s PC when he left town for the weekend. I instantly became hooked, so I guess I’m a veteran flight-simmer! These days time is limited to about two flying hours per week, though. Usually I choose light aircraft, because I enjoy a pure hands-on flying.

Flight simulation inspired me enough to learn real-world aviation: I have a Commercial Pilot’s License with Instrument rating and some 260 hours. I haven’t flown for about seven years now, so I’m not current, but even back when flight-sim graphics were in four or sixteen colors, they helped me tremendously through ALL my ratings. Once my instructor, during my first lesson on instrument-rating training, noticed I was pretty good. On my second lesson he had me fly an ILS approach right down to minimums at Dallas Love Field! What a homage to flight simulators…

By now I’m convinced it’s crucial for flight-simmers to defrag regularly. Could you please explain (in simple terms, and without us falling asleep) a little theory of what goes on in the hard drive while we sim, and what are the benefits of a good defragging policy?
Yes, Jarn. Defragging is crucial, not only for flight simulation software, but for any software that accesses a lot of files during its operation. The more files associated with a program’s install, the more important defragging becomes.

But defragging is not all. The other aspect is file-placement optimization.

Running a flight-sim is very disk-intensive in general, but even more so if the scenery is photoreal (like MegaScenery, for example). While in flight, the sim is continuously accessing hundreds, even thousands of graphic files, in order to dinamically generate scenery that covers the entire distance from your aircraft up to the horizon, all around you! You will notice this by watching how the hard-disk’s access light is furiously blinking, a simple indicator of heavy reading activity. So to load your scenery as fast as possible it is of critical importance that scenery files be contiguous (not fragmented) but equally important is the physical closeness of the files among each other on the hard-drive. The more scattered and fragmented your files are, the more the hard-drive heads must travel to read the data, which will degrade overall performance.

After hard-drive optimization you will see marginally better framerates, but the real difference is in reduction of “the blurries” (because the scenery is loaded as fast as physically possible for that particular hard drive) and also a noticeable reduction in time when switching between aircraft or scenery areas.

A standard FSX installation (without any addons) weighs around 15GB and 51,000 files. But the software’s performance is already handicapped, because after completion of a typical install, around 20,000 of these files will be fragmented! So we strongly recommend an immediate defrag after initial installation of FSX, FS2004, or in fact any other software, since any installation generates many fragmented files. This applies to FS add-ons as well.

In short: a good defrag policy is crucial, not only for flight-simming, but for the overall performance of your PC.

You have designed UltimateDefrag, so go on and tell us why should we flight-simmers invest our cash in your product instead on someone else’s.
UltimateDefrag does what no other defragging product does: it optimizes file placement. If your files are not fragmented, but the reading heads must move all around the drive to locate and read scenery files, aircraft textures, and so on, performance will be that of a fragmented-files hard-drive anyway. With one file at one end of the disk and the next file at the other end, the heads still need to make a full travel-seek to go from one file to the next, and file access becomes painfully slow. An unordered file system can drag as much as a heavily fragmented file system.

UltimateDefrag increases performance by positioning the files you want the best performance from into the faster outer tracks of your hard drive (files on the outer tracks are read twice as fast as files located on the inner tracks). It then puts all the files that you rarely use out of the way, into the inner tracks of your hard drive. Flight-sim files stick together in one small area of the fastest part of your drive: maximum performance! And on top of that UD sorts files by filename and folder, increasing efficiency even more.

With UltimateDefrag, overall hard drive performance can improve up to 400% above what manufacturers quote as the average performance. No other defragger can improve your flight experience so much.

Cool. Thanks for your time, Robert.
You’re welcome Jarn!