Which Disk Defragmenter?

[lodore]

Originally Posted by Paranoid2000

I've trialled PerfectDisk 2008 and would give it a definite thumbs down for the following reasons:

• Speed - it was significantly slower than Windows' own defrag, even after having run it a few times. I suspect this was due to its "Smart" placement which seemed to keep defragmenting the same files (possibly moving them to different places on disk).
• UI - highly wasteful of screen space, due in large part to the ribbon interface - running this on a small screen would be a nightmare. Just because Microsoft does something doesn't make it a good idea!
• Bloat - 43MB is a lot for a utility (though when installed, it took up a more modest 30MB) but it also adds two services, one of which (PD91Agent) is totally unnecessary, as it just handles scheduling. Windows' own Task Scheduler can (and should) be used for this job. The 3 background processes (PD91Agent, PD91Scanner, PD91Engine took up 15-95MB on my system, whether PerfectDisk itself (another 25MB) was running or not.
• "SMARTplacement" - for all the brouhaha I'd expect something fairly significant. Locating large files on the outer tracks of a disk can certainly triple transfer rates in theory, yet PerfectDisk never did this. It would move some data to the centre of the drive but never to the edge (which corresponds to the end sections of the drive map) and its own performance indicators showed virtually no change over previous use of Windows' own disk defragmentation.

On the whole, plenty of blow but little to show in my experience.

Hey Paranoid2000,
thats pretty much my experience as well.
plus the boot time defrag didnt work. due to driver not loading.
have you tryed any other defrag programs?

[Huupi]

To have a good organised file layout on disk is without question so defrag is sometimes necessary,but to have a long thread on ''which is best'' is a waste of time,IMO there,s no essential differences between them in terms of refragment times and perf. gain,so take whatever you fit,even windows default defragger is great.Afterall they all use the windows API.

Well after being a long time die hard PD user I have to admit I am very impressed with O&O Defrag Pro version 11 and am keeping it for now over PD 2008 till PD gets its act together.

[SandyD]

I read this thread with interest and just wonder is it really important to even use a defragger? I find it funny when people notice a 2 second gain in opening a program by using this program over that one. Does it really matter?
What about the risk that this intentional moving about of files may corrupt the drive - anyone having had a bad experience?

[Seer]

Originally Posted by SandyD

is it really important to even use a defragger?

Not IMO.
Defraggers are nice little toys with little colorful squares dancing around your screen and all that eye-candy stuff, but here is what I find really interesting about them. Resource hogging and runnung unnecessary services aside, I had a little test of my own recently with a couple of these beasts and I will just give an example - I have 3 partitions, system C, data D & E on a single HDD on this PC. Uncompressed, unshadowed, just the plain old NTFS. The partitions were never defragged in a life of HD (1,5 years). Here's the "Fragmentation Analysis" results from a couple of popular defraggers (latest versions of course) - C, D and E respectively -

1. SmartDefrag - 55%, 42%, 44%
2. PerfectDisk - 4%, 5.5%, 7%
3. Diskeeper - 32%, 14%, 78%

Now, WTF was that? I would very much like to rationalize the use of defraggers on my systems, but with such results it is very hard to find a reason. As it is (and always was) no defragger for me, thank you...

[Ed_H]

I have been using PD for several years. I used to get a definite improvement in system responsiveness, especially with off-line defrags. With the latest version, I don't notice any improvement at all over not defragging and sometimes my laptop actually seems slower after a defrag with PD.

So, I am trying Ultimate Defrag right now and I would say there is a small improvement in performance but for some reason it always shows the fragmentation level at 27%. I also seem to need to defrag at least daily to maintain the increased performance.

[silver0066]

I was also using PD for years but the new update is too slow and even though I got it working with FolderLock (Raxco said this is impossible). Because of their poor support policies, this gave me a chance to experiment and I have switched to Ultimate Defrag for two reasons.

1. More options for optimizing placement of files than any of the others I have tested. (Puran, PD, Smart, O&O, JKDefrag). It does not have boot time defrag, but it will work fine with Puran, which has a very small footprint, to do this function every once in awhile.

I have two (1 is external) 750 gb disks for program storage and backup. I am now doing a Folder/Name defrag with the strictly sorted option and putting the backup files at the beginning of the disk. I am also using the 20% HP/80% archive for recent files in addition to respecting high performance and archiving. This defrag is on the two 750 GB drives that I use for storage and backup. It is a long process since these several year old drives have never been defragged. If you use Consolidate with archiving with fast placement and on the next defrags, it should run very quickly and also speed up my backups.

It runs very quickly on my System and Data partitions also.

2. Perfect Disk was going to take over 3 days to defrag a 750 Gb Sata drive using SmartPlacement. Way too long.

Silver

[Coolio10]

Lowered my choices down. Mainly only ones that optimize.

Puran Defrag - I like it, simple, yet effective and getting more popular here.
UltimateDefrag - Did a good job according to perfectdisk and i like the detailed disk view/image (fun to watch) Its time left is useless, sometimes hours off.
Smart Defrag - Not sure how good of a job but its getting a lot of publicity here.
PerfectDisk - Some people seem to think its overhyped, and im starting to think so too.

Maybe: O&O and JKDEFRAG

Now please give me your reasons for/for not using each of the above.

I did chkdsk on both my computers and now UD got the fragmentation below 2%.

[Coolio10]

UltimateDefrag did an amazing job. But has to be one of the slowest defragmenters i have ever used. Having a useless time left doesn't help.

See results below. I think its best to run puran just before to make it easier on UD.

I think best combination is puran+ultimate.

Not sure how much puran contributed but i did run it just before UD and the perfectdisk analysis is perfect.

[Paranoid2000]

Originally Posted by lodore

plus the boot time defrag didnt work. due to driver not loading.
have you tryed any other defrag programs?

Boot time failed once for me due to a driver conflict but worked when I repeated it.

I've downloaded a copy of Puran - at 2.3MB it should show a lot less bloat though I don't expect much improvement performance-wise from it either. The main benefits a third party utility could offer would be a more informative UI plus some control over file placement.

The reason I think performance gains would be minimal is that while defragmenting files is straightforward, locating them on disk for best performance is really hard. Moving files to the end (where transfer rates should be best) is only likely to work for large files - with small ones what you gain on transfer speeds would be lost on seek times.

But many users run utilities (AV scanners, desktop theming software, mouse drivers) that require frequent file access and this can typically occur when a new program is started (the AV scanner will intercept the file request which will trigger another further disk access to its program/database, a mouse driver hook may need to be loaded for each new window opened, etc). It is this that can throw the spanner in any file placement algorithm since multiple files in different locations will need to be accessed and this can't be done without incurring seek time penalties (unless you switch to SSD or ramdisk).

The best option would seem to involve using a tool like FileMon to identify those files accessed regularly and then relocating them to a new partition on a separate disk (or creating a ramdisk if plenty of RAM is available). This would mean uninstall/reinstalling the application since creating a link/shortcut from the old to the new partition would still incur a seek penalty. Once this is done, they should no longer interfere with placement strategy on the main disk.

A disk optimisation tool that took all those steps automatically should provide a more noticeable benefit than current third party defragmentation tools. Anyone up for writing one?

Originally Posted by Coolio10

Lowered my choices down. Mainly only ones that optimize. O&O excluded since it doesn't say which setting to use or any advice.

Puran Defrag - I like it, simple, yet effective and getting more popular here.
UltimateDefrag - Did a good job according to perfectdisk and i like the detailed disk view/image (fun to watch) Its time left is useless, sometimes hours off.
Smart Defrag - Not sure how good of a job but its getting a lot of publicity here.
PerfectDisk - Some people seem to think its overhyped, and im starting to think so too.

Now please give me your reasons for/for not using each of the above.

I did chkdsk on both my computers and now UD got the fragmentation below 2%.

If you looked at the help file of O&O it gives detailed advice on what strategy to adapt, it this particular aspect that impresses me the most. The choices are far more than what other defraggers offer and when done right, O&O excels in terms of performance.

[Bunkhouse Buck]

Originally Posted by Seer

Not IMO.
Defraggers are nice little toys with little colorful squares dancing around your screen and all that eye-candy stuff, but here is what I find really interesting about them. Resource hogging and runnung unnecessary services aside, I had a little test of my own recently with a couple of these beasts and I will just give an example - I have 3 partitions, system C, data D & E on a single HDD on this PC. Uncompressed, unshadowed, just the plain old NTFS. The partitions were never defragged in a life of HD (1,5 years). Here's the "Fragmentation Analysis" results from a couple of popular defraggers (latest versions of course) - C, D and E respectively -

1. SmartDefrag - 55%, 42%, 44%
2. PerfectDisk - 4%, 5.5%, 7%
3. Diskeeper - 32%, 14%, 78%

Now, WTF was that? I would very much like to rationalize the use of defraggers on my systems, but with such results it is very hard to find a reason. As it is (and always was) no defragger for me, thank you...

The reality is, they do little (if any) good at all. They are a "feel good" thing- not something that actually achieves something.

[lodore]

Originally Posted by Bunkhouse Buck

The reality is, they do little (if any) good at all. They are a "feel good" thing- not something that actually achieves something.

so you think companies spend thousands of pounds on defrag programs just for a good feel?

[Ocky]

Maybe pedestrian, but is there anything 'wrong' with my way ?

I use Contig (couple KB's) together with the Power Defragmenter GUI
for Contig. Plus Pagedefrag when necessary. Also wipe free space
with Blowfish Advanced. I find these tools used fairly regularly are
a small improvement on the Windows defragmenter.

Contig 1.54

Power Defragmenter GUI for Contig

Pagedefrag

[Bunkhouse Buck]

Originally Posted by lodore

so you think companies spend thousands of pounds on defrag programs just for a good feel?

You got it- just as financial companies spent millions on software and programming to trade mortgage backed derivative securities and now have trillions of dollars of losses worldwide. The number of dollars spent by companies and consumers for defraggers, does not validate the efficacy of them.

I have not seen any definitive evidence that defragmenters do anything to speed up a modern hard drive. I have seen evidence they actually slow them up in some cases.

Why would MS give the base DK with its OS then? Unlike Linux FS, NTFS gets fragmented over time and use.

[lodore]

Originally Posted by Arup

Why would MS give the base DK with its OS then? Unlike Linux FS, NTFS gets fragmented over time and use.

then it is microsoft's fault for creating a bad file system.

Originally Posted by lodore

then it is microsoft's fault for creating a bad file system.

It is but MS and Windows is a necessary evil........so there you go.

[Bunkhouse Buck]

Originally Posted by Arup

Why would MS give the base DK with its OS then? Unlike Linux FS, NTFS gets fragmented over time and use.

You are not suggesting that Microsoft including DK base makes them the expert of last resort about this? If you grant that premise, than you cannot fault them for creating an OS that is prone to malware invasions since they know it all- right?

The fragmenting does not entail slower access times with NTFS on a modern hard drive. I have seen data from others (and in our own tests), that there is no significant difference between fragmented files and their defragmented state.

Originally Posted by Bunkhouse Buck

You are not suggesting that Microsoft including DK base makes them the expert of last resort about this? If you grant that premise, than you cannot fault them for creating an OS that is prone to malware invasions since they know it all- right?

The fragmenting does not entail slower access times with NTFS on a modern hard drive. I have seen data from others (and in our own tests), that there is no significant difference between fragmented files and their defragmented state.

My experience tells me otherwise, I have tried not to defragment and have seen significant time increase in boot, program access as well as data access so I bet to differ here.

[lodore]

Originally Posted by Bunkhouse Buck

You are not suggesting that Microsoft including DK base makes them the expert of last resort about this? If you grant that premise, than you cannot fault them for creating an OS that is prone to malware invasions since they know it all- right?

The fragmenting does not entail slower access times with NTFS on a modern hard drive. I have seen data from others (and in our own tests), that there is no significant difference between fragmented files and their defragmented state.

malware isnt completely microsoft's fault. yes internet explorer does allow infected by just visiting a website due to activeX but its mainly targeted due to the amount of people who use it. mac's are starting to get malware.

creating a decent file system that doesnt need defragging is something that should definatly be sorted out. its definatly microsoft's fault no doubt.

Yes and so is registry as well, Linux file structure is far superior but sadly we do have to live with MS as well and therefore deal with its vagaries.

[GlobalForce]

I doubt the contribution's that went beyond speculation were even noticed, let alone acknowledged. Hat's off gentlemen!

Larger and faster drives have minimized the impact of fragmentation. The Windows file system tends to fragment files all on its own to a small degree, but fragmentation starts for real when the drive starts to get full—as in over 70%. As the drive fills up, the larger areas of free space become scarce and the file system has no choice but to splatter large files around the disk. As the drive gets really full (over 90%), the file system then starts to fragment the MFT and the Pagefile. Now you've got a full drive, with lots of fragmented files, making the job of the defragmenter nearly impossible because it also needs space to do its job. It is my opinion that a drive more than 80% full is not defragmentable. You can see that effect with huge hard disk drives, since they generally use smaller percentages of the drive's total free space. A side-effect is that the overall fragmentation is reduced, and the fact that these drives have faster seek times makes the effect even less noticeable.

-- Mark Patton

[lodore]

Originally Posted by GlobalForce

I doubt the contribution's that went beyond speculation were even noticed, let alone acknowledged. Hat's off gentlemen!

-- Mark Patton

thanks for giving me an excuse to get that 1tb samsung spinpoint £80
acually ill probaly just get 4gb of ram.

[Long View]

Originally Posted by Coolio10

UltimateDefrag did an amazing job. But has to be one of the slowest defragmenters i have ever used.

Perhaps you have a bit too much on your drive ?