Diskeeper® 12 Released

Diskeeper® 12 Released



Latest Product Information Diskeeper 12 Features

CPU and memory performance has increased geometrically while storage performance has lagged behind. Slow performance can bottleneck a whole system slowing your applications. That is where Diskeeper® 12 performance software comes in. It runs transparently and proactively 24/7 to accelerate file I/O ensuring peak application and storage performance.
Diskeeper® 12 brings a critical efficiency boost that is constant, automatic and cost-effective. Diskeeper’s proactive enterprise level technology prevents file fragmentation before it starts. Diskeeper allows you to focus on your business not IT by keeping your systems running like new improving business productivity and extending the time between technology refreshes.
With the release of Diskeeper 12, only the following editions will be available:

• Home
• Professional
• Server
• Administrator - Coming Soon!

Diskeeper 12 Key Features

The following features bring about systems that are much faster, energy friendly and require less maintenance.
IntelliWrite® fragmentation prevention technology IntelliWrite proactively prevents up to 85% of file fragmentation from ever occurring, dramatically improving application and storage performance on Windows® machines with no resource usage.
IntelliWrite is especially advantageous for storage technologies such as Virtual and SAN storage systems. This not only gets the performance gains of defragmentation, but also enforces more contiguous/sequential write I/Os which is beneficial for the SAN environment.
Instant Defrag™ engine Since any fragmented file can slow system performance, Instant Defrag immediately defrags recently written files before they can be read. Instant Defrag offers new intelligence that understands how your files are used and ensures they never have to be read in pieces. Combined with IntelliWrite, every system runs at peak performance 24/7 regardless of workload. No system has ever been able to do this before!
New! HyperFast® 2.0 SSD Optimizer HyperFast solid state drive optimizer now comes standard with Diskeeper. HyperFast is the only technology designed specifically to produce faster performance in solid state drives running on Microsoft® operating systems. HyperFast now includes TRIM functionality to improve performance. The HyperFast feature will only be enabled if a solid state drive is recognized.
New! CogniSAN™ Technology Detects external resource usage within a shared storage system, such as a SAN, and allows for increased performance without intruding in any way into SAN–layer operations.
New! System Monitoring Monitors system environment activities and provides a summary of the statistical data gathered for system performance monitoring purposes.
New! Disk Health Monitoring Monitors SMART disk data; checks for other critical file system problems; warns of critical problems or an imminent disk failure; generates alerts by e-mail for 24/7 monitoring.
New! HyperBoot™ Technology HyperBoot technology improves system boot times. HyperBoot operates completely in the background, requiring no user interaction and will not impact system resources.
I-FAAST® File Optimization I-FAAST improves file access and creation with a 10% - 20% faster average access time, and it surpasses the benefits gained with defragmentation alone, by optimizing placement of your most frequently accessed data. Now I-FAAST also honors file exclusion which improves compatibility with third party applications while allowing finer adjustment by the sys admin in specialized situations. I-FAAST is available in Diskeeper Professional and Server.
InvisiTasking Priority Monitors changes in fragmentation state on all volumes; if necessary uses system resources more aggressively without impacting application performance to ensure progress in eliminating fragmentation that is severely degrading performance while still maintaining zero resource conflicts with running applications.
New! Space Reclamation Engine The new Space Reclamation Engine is designed to zero out blocks of unused space on SANs and thin-provisioned volumes in virtual environments so that the controller or hypervisor will reclaim the blocks and free them up, giving you more available space for your virtual machines. This feature is only available in Diskeeper Server.
New! Updated User Interface Fresh new user interface with an easy simplified navigation that allows users to see what is happening at a glance, but still provides drill–down architecture of information for those that want it. A platform independent design with a modern look and feel for all levels of users, from Enterprise, to Small Businesses, to Home users.
Titan Defrag Engine® technology The Titan Defrag Engine (TDE) is now available in Diskeeper Server. TDE runs on extremely large multi TB volumes and is the only efficient solution capable of handling volumes of many terabytes and millions of files. Titan Defrag Engine takes only hours to defragment volumes of a few terabytes where other methods take days, if they can function at all. The Titan Defrag Engine, available in Diskeeper Server, is the only technology that can defragment volumes of multi terabytes.
Terabyte Volume Engine® technology The Terabyte Volume Engine (TVE) is now available in Diskeeper Professional. TVE is specifically engineered to rapidly defragment volumes with hundreds of thousands of files quickly and easily.
Efficient Mode In addition to an extensive defragmentation mode, Efficient Mode offers the greatest net gain in system I/O resource savings ever available. It is smart enough to know what fragmentation is a problem and immediately targets and eliminates fragmentation that directly affects system performance. Efficient Mode is now available in all desktop and server editions.
Free Space Consolidation Engine This advanced engine swiftly consolidates free space and tightly integrates with Instant Defrag to handle new fragmentation as soon as it is created.
Disk Performance Analyzer for Networks® tool Our agent-less performance analysis technology is tightly integrated with Diskeeper 12 Administrator. Now you can get real-time performance metrics (even on machines not yet running Diskeeper) with high-level visual graphs and detailed fragmentation data on-demand or emailed automatically.
IPv6 networks support Only Diskeeper provides full product functionality and management support in native IPv6 networks.
Performance Map Performance Map gives a quick "at-a-glance" indication of file access performance for each volume.
Diskeeper Administrator Edition Diskeeper Administrator offers fully automated network defragmentation management. Administrators can set policies and “bind” them to groups (such as an Organizational unit in Active Directory). Computers added in to the group (OU) have your Diskeeper settings automatically applied.

http://www.condusiv.com/products/diskeeper/

TH

 

thanks for the heads up TH. Not sure I'm liking the GUI though.

 

also not liking it uses microsoft.net now. i also dont like the gui... not a huge diskeeper fan but wanted to give it a spin to try it out

 

IMHO the GUI is gross...but you can see the preparation for Win8 going on here. Will be interesting to see how well the new version stacks up to PD 12.5.

 

For a software whose exclusive function is defragmentation, the options of "analyze", "defragment" and "defrag properties" should be on the main screen and other functions like SMART, drive health etc can be one or two clicks away.

Now in this new gui, the important functions are not to be found on the main screen. When the user has to hunt for the analyze and defragment buttons in a defrag software, then you know something is wrong.

If they had to change the gui they could have changed the drive fragmentation display. I like the way Perfectdisk displays your before and after drive fragmentation graphs and I have never understood the Diskeeper's before and after drive fragmentation graphs.

 

You're not supposed to do manual defrags, leaving it to do it automatically is the most effective and recommended option from their statement, but still, indeed somewhat confusing interface, but you're not supposed to drill around in it every day

 

Diskeeper people are Gnomes, they scurry about the Diskeeper building, planning on new ventures, and other misbehaviour

 

Yes, Diskeeper has always placed a strong focus on automated defrag, which is great for servers. For my home pc I just defrag manually with PerfectDisk. PD seems to be putting more emphasis on automated defrag now as well, but at least as of v11 it's easy to turn off and the GUI is still easy to use. I haven't tried the latest v12.5. It seems to me that defrag software is already highly optimized and there's not a lot more they can do to improve it. New versions are starting to look mainly like new paint jobs

 

Diskeeper 12 is definitely not just a "new paint job" - below are some new features (from the company blog):

HyperBoot®
o HyperBoot technology has been incorporated into Diskeeper to improve system boot time.

CogniSAN™
o Technology that detects external resource usage within a shared storage system, such as a SAN, and allows for transparent optimization by never competing for resources utilized by other systems over the same storage infrastructure without intruding in any way into SAN-layer operations. (Server editions only)

Disk Health
o This feature monitors hard disk for S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) data to generate alerts and provides a disk health report, warns of critical problems or an imminent disk failure, generates by email.

System Monitoring
o System Monitoring collects system environment activity and provides reporting on key elements. This includes statistical data about system I/O usage, disk state, and Diskeeper effectiveness. The option to send data for analysis at Condusiv Technologies also exists, providing a summary of the statistical data gathered for system performance monitoring purposes.

Space Reclamation engine
o Allows the user to manually or automatically zero out unused space from thin provisioned volumes on SAN and disk array storage.

 

That is true but still a software that is exclusively meant for defrag, should have the relevant options on its main screen. Just look at the main screen in the attached pic by the OP, just tell me which button would you click if you wanted to run a fragmentation analysis on one of your partitions? I am sure you will find it eventually, but the way the new gui is designed it is non-intuitive.

You are right, diskeeper recommends automatic defrags, as the engine inside diskeeper is optimized for automatic defragmentation. However, if you have a volume that is highly fragmented, it is better to run a manual defrag pass on it first to get the fragmentation level near to zero and then set the auto defrag. This greatly helps if you do regular backups with increments on that volume, you can do a full backup after the first manual defrag pass and then the data movement during the auto defrag passes will not be that much to cause abnormal size increase in the subsequent incremental backups.

 

If you exclude the disk health and system monitoring, as they can be easily done by various freeware utilities, the only new thing that has been added for the home and pro users is the hyperboot. CogniSan is only for servers. So, if you are a Vista or windows 7 user, you already have readyboot service by microsoft which does an adequate job or boosting your boot times, you probably do not need hyperboot.

That means if you already have Diskeeper 2011, you do not need to upgrade to v12 as nothing new has been added to the defrag engine.

 

Hilarious

 

No, they still recommend manual degrag over continuous auto defrag. Have a look at this white paper from Raxco on the differences between perfect disk 12 and diskeeper 2011.

Since the above testing was done by Raxco, so it is no surprise that Perfectdisk came out looking better, I am sure if Diskeeper guys had done the same tests, somehow diskeeper would have come on top. My question is does anyone know of a neutral third party review of both diskeeper and perfectdisk, performing similar comparative tests as done in the above white paper?

 

I have been using Diskeeper since 2004 and never had issues with it and now that I have 2 SSD's it's still working very well! And the 2 pictures shows the proper settings for SSD's!

And this was from support when I asked this question for Diskeeper 2011 with Hyperfast!

Also notice that it doesn't Defrag when it detects SSD drives!

TH

 

I should have qualified my "new paint job" statement. I already mentioned that Diskeeper is very strong with regard to automation and well suited to the server environment where you don't want to lay on hands all the time. However for my home system these features are not important to me. I prefer to run defrag on demand and I don't see that much has changed in recent versions of Diskeeper (or PerfectDisk either) when used that way. So for me upgrading would only get me a new GUI - in other words new paint.

 

Holy smoke! That's one ugly duckling.

 

Is that the final GUI?
I can't believe they released DK with that GUI. The main menu looks kinda weird, colors does not blend properly. The other menus are fine.

 

You guys sound like little girls yukky GUI Just kidding!

TH

 

Well for geeky people like us GUI might not be important but for most users i'm pretty sure it does.

 

GUI opinions aside, the software does not require a lot of fiddling with. At the very most there are some basic initial setting adjustments. But going forward, it runs automatically in the background and requires zero interfaces with the user.

Regarding manual defrag, this is never a good idea. Raza0007, I haven’t found a 3rd party comparison, but I think the difference is pretty easy to understand. Fragmentation is continuously building up on the computer right?

So why wouldn’t you want a solution running at all times handling it – especially if it did so using only idle system resources.

The built-in defrag program on Windows 7 for example, is set to run once a week at 1am – what’s handling the fragmentation during the rest of the week?

Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(computer)

“Memory fragmentation is a kernel programming level problem. During real-time computing of applications, fragmentation levels can reach as high as 99%, and quickly leads to system crashes. This type of system crash can be difficult to avoid, as it is impossible to anticipate the critical rise in levels of memory fragmentation.”

I know this is user-generated content, but if this wasn’t FACT then the powers that be would’ve edited it by now.

Still think manual is a good idea?

-Alex

 

because i don't want something that runs all the time, even if it runs only at idle times.
i don't want a program that installs a whole bunch of services, drivers and whatnot.
i'm sure i'm not the only one.

nothing.
mine is not even set on a schedule.
i just run it like i feel just so.

in my case, i think once a month is enough.
or until my fragmentation level reach 10% or so.
whichever comes first.lol

 

Yes, fragmentation builds over time. I use PerfectDisk and it has a performance monitoring component which shows how drive performance deteriorates as fragmentation increases. The rate of fragmentation varies depending on how the computer is used. In my own case defragging about once a month keeps performance at near maximum. On the other hand automated, continuous defrag keeps fragmentation down without user intervention. That's good if it's inconvenient for the user to do, or if the user isn't aware of the need for disk maintenance, but there is some overhead. Most of the impact is avoided by only defragging when the system is idle, or the screensaver is running, etc, but there is overhead. My point is it's not black or white. Suggesting that a user cannot adequately maintain the system manually is incorrect IMHO.

 

Give me some real measurements of the increase in load/save times of real world applications due to not defragging for a day caused by this fragmentation.

My benchmarks show you need to accumulate atleast a months worth of daily office usage of fragmentation to generate benchmarks that show a performance loss above statistical variation of multiple runs of before/after benchmarks.

I would if it can be shown there is measurable benefit. In certain cases this could be true, e.g. on a machine doing heavy P2P downloading or used for video editting, but for the average user, whose usage pattern is similar to the one I mentioned above no.

You can modify the schedule of the built in Win 7 defrag to run every 5 minutes using the Task Scheduler and it only uses idle resources all for no extra costs, why pay for diskeeper do to this ?

What has memory fragmentation got to do with disk based fragmentation. And crashes due to memory fragmentation is not a problem for any OS that uses virtualised memory access (Windows uses a page table) as all an app will ever see is contiguous allocation that it needs.

 

Hate the GUI, like everyone else. Also, $29.95 for 3 PCs for the home version, yet 64.95 for a single license of the Professional version? Per PC, that's 6.5 times as much for Pro as Home, and I'm sure that the Home versions lacks a great many of the features they are advertising. No I-FAAST, no free space consolidation, and a 1TB disk size limit on the Home. Yep for the price of 1 copy of the Pro, I can buy an Internet Security Suite from a top vendor for 3 PCs, with updates multiple times a day. How do they justify this pricing? No thanks Executive Software, I mean Diskeeper Corporation, I mean Condusiv Technologies, or whatever you will be calling yourself next week.

 

If the manual defrag can eliminate fragmentation up to 99% in a single pass, as claimed by Perfectdisk in the white paper I referenced earlier, why is it not a good idea?

I have got nothing against a continuously running defragmentor, but if a single pass can eliminate 99% defragmentation, then some would prefer running a single defrag pass 2-3 times a week, instead of running something continuously in the background.