Diskeeper, PerfectDisk and Vista SP1

Hello,

i am working with those two commercial defraggers for some time already, and recently my preference was always towards DK11. (Btw. i have the latest versions/updates of any of those defragmentation programs).

I have reason to believe that the latest DK (.781) messes up my MFT or does something else weird to my filesystem under Vista SP1. I got a new HD which i tested out ok, so it doesnt have bad sectors or anything.

Running Diskeeper it already happened twice in a week that my MFT was corrupted and i got various messages in event viewer in regards to filesystem corruption. I had to play back 300GB backups two times already. I have reason to believe it MIGHT have to do with the MFT frag-shield of diskeeper.

I deinstalled it now since in the latest version .781 ifaast was at "pending" for days already....and boottime defrag was disabled anyway "due to incompatibility with SP1"...so it was kind of pointless.

So...right now my filesystem is ok and ever since i deinstalled DK i didnt have any corruption anymore - so i strongly tend towards PerfectDisk at the moment until DK fixes whatever is going on there.

I really like(d) the fact how diskeeper made an intelligent free-speace consolidation using i-faast and was placing seldom used files at the end of the HD. This resulted in the nice benefit that free space was always in the middle/beginning of the HD...therefore no "degradation" of the HD over time.

PD i like very much since it does a better job in off-line and metadata defragmentation....but even with the latest PerfectDisk i dont like the fact that PD always uses "old-style" consolidation and consolidates/defrags all files in ONE block at the beginning of the HD - with the free space at the end.

This is especially noticeable if you have eg. a 500GB where there is only, say, 20% free. So..the end of the HD is approx 50% slower in terms of transfer rate....and PD would leave the remaining free space always at the end, thus making new writes to the HD slow.

Right now i deinstalled DK, i use/activate PD only if i think i need to defrag my meta-data..and i will observe how my filesystem is doing right now without Diskeeper which otherwise i liked very much.

G.

 

You may lay an eye on Ultimate Defrag from DiskTrix,its highly configurable !

http://www.disktrix.com/

 

have you tryed contacting diskeeper support?
diskeeper support is very helpful and friendly when i have contacted them in the past.

 

BTW, support from Diskeeper Corporation is terrible these days. They give wrong information (their technical support staff don't even understand their products well until I asked them to read the readme file) and respond more than 2 weeks after I raised my question. If I don't follow up my question, they even won't reply.

On the contrary, support from Raxco is good and fast.

 

i have some email address of two diskeeper employees and they are both very good at responding to questions last time i contacted them.

 

I am using PD_2008 with In Vista Home Premium, and don't notice the slowdown in disk performance you mention, but my drives are a bit smaller (230-320 GB) and not as full (only about 30%)

But I previously had excellent results with Paragon Total Defrag (same system). PTD has the option of placing recentklly used files either at the first or last of the disk. You might try it (you can download a 30 day trial).

I only switched to PD-2008 based on the excellent reviews and some of the theoretical advantages cited in their marketing literature. I can't claim that it has really been superior in practical disk performance. So maybe PTD actually gives a better result for your situation.

 

well yes, i read many reviews and (for some reason) the latest PD always comes out top notch. But observing filesystem structure i always see how it consolidates all used space in ONE chunk....which i dont like.

I think DK does this very intelligent, eg. putting unused, long archives and videos etc. at the end, keeping a free gap always rather in the middle which is a good thing.

 

When i was trialling the DK ProPremier version some time ago, I liked that feature of DK ProPremier too i.e. the space it leaves in the middle of the drive. Logically, that makes the most sense- to allow the most frequently accessed files to grow into the free space from a smaller consolidated block rather than from a single block. That way, it has less files to shuffle around during the next defrag run.

It's been so long since I last trialled PD, that I forgot what exactly it used to do.

PS: I have the full (paid) version of DK 2008 Pro (not Premier) on Vista 32-bit HP with SP1 installed, and have not got any MFT or file system corruption so far. The latest update did however disable boot-time MFT defrag (temporarily I hope).