PerfectDisk vs Diskeeper? Which is better?

That's quite an assumption and even better than I thought, if it is true of course. As soon as I have more time, I will test it.

For the record : I work with "Acronis True Image Home version 9.0 (build 3567), which is probably the very latest version.
My home computer isn't an entreprise yet. My wife maybe LOL.

 

Yep, it is. I thought you posted in another thread you were using version 8. My bad, misremembered.

Back in the days when defragmenters weren't near as powerful as now, an alternative defragmentation method was (and still is, I believe) to backup, reformat, and then restore your hard drive.

 

Acronis states that sectors may not be put back in the same locations.

In any case, TI does not back up the pagefile, and probably does not optimally locate the file system structures, so you need to defrag again to allow PD to place things effectively.

 

Yes, but that results in ineffective pacement of files, page file, and file system structures, which is at least as important as squuezing out holes in the file layout.

The ONLY issue withdefragmentation is NOT whether one should use, say, Perfect Disk, but how often to defrag. The latter will vary depending on the usage of each system.

Easiest may be to use Perfect Disk, and let it's Trend Analysis run once per day, at, at 02:00 to build a data base. PD provides a downloadable Access file for just this purpose.

 

Agreed. I guess it's up to ErikAlbert to say whether his meaning of "defragged" in his original question implied optimal file placement or not - but as the question was put in the context of running PerfectDisk, I'll admit I would tend to have assumed a default SmartPlacement strategy when using PerfectDisk if I had thought about it that deeply.

 

I first use the trial version of PD in Feb 2006 and then when I installed the retail version in March.

Running a boot defrag and a SmartPlacement, with PD, does wonders.
Very, very, little file fragments, even on my actively use drives.
And there was a noticeable performance improvement.

 

Yep, that's exactly how my PCs have their Friday night fun (actually 2 am Saturday, after the bars close).

 

Has anyone done actual measurements to see if PerfectDisk/Diskeeper defragmentation offer any real advantages over Windows' own Defrag tool? Given that NTFS does not suffer from fragmentation to the extent that FAT/FAT32 did, I would be surprised to see major differences and would suggest that a monthly Windows Defrag should suffice for most people.

 

After the bars close, detoxification may be more appropriate than defragging.

 

THere are many articles.

Start with the ones at the Raxco, Diskeeper and O&O web sites, and ANY article that objectively discusses defragging.

Note that the Perfect disk web site gives tools that can be used to demonstrate the effects.

There are noticeable differences.

 

I had TWO reasons to buy PerfectDisk :
1. It's a good defragmenter according many members, better than Windows Defragmenter.
2. I don't have to exclude "c:\$isr\0\$isrbin", when I ever use FirstDefense-ISR

If I have Diskeeper, I have to remember to exclude "c:\$isr\0\$isrbin" everytime I re-install Diskeeper.

 

Not independent ones comparing the different tools.

Vendors tend to provide feature lists rather than actual performance comparisons. Even when a comparison is present (Raxco being the only one to offer them), not enough information is given on the test environment to make it conclusive.

In Raxco's case, they use WinBench to demonstrate the performance difference - no argument there. But the benchmark results for the "Before Defrag" systems vary from 4,370 to 8,850 despite them appearing to use the same disk image (the only reported difference was in the OS Service Pack applied) while the PerfectDisk results vary from 5,100 to 14,800. This variability raises a question mark over undocumented areas of system setup - in particular the Windows swapfile will have a significant effect if it ever becomes fragmented, but users can prevent this by making it fixed (setting its minimum and maximum size to equal values). So was the test system set up to minimise this effect and, if not, how greatly does it exaggerate the results compared to a well set-up system?

Diskeeper offer this white paper which is quite comprehensive about the effects of fragmentation but no comparisons are made with other products - the author did use a variable swapfile but tried to minimise its effect by running a simfrag utility to create fragmentation.

O&O offer a dated comparison between themselves and Diskeeper - here it is made clear that the swap file is variable.

So Raxco do offer the most detailed performance evaluation, but don't include enough information on test setup to make it truly conclusive.

 

Also these are tests over a very short period of time, to get a real picture we need to monitor progress of defragging regularly over a period of a month or so, to get a decent amount of disc usage in between defrag runs.

I've done the maths before on another thread, talking specifically about file fragmentation, NOT placement, but I worked out something like 2% performance gain reading the entire disk was possible at BEST according to diskeeper on my hdd that was fragmented, not taking into account any caching or similar tricks.

In real world use things get even more marginal when you take into account that it is very very very rare for the ntfs driver to read an entire file in one go (even reading a bit divx movie), therefore the chances of actually encountering having to read different fragments is rare in proportion to number of disc i/o operations.

Factor in caching and things like prefetching of xp and you can see why in GENERAL real world use there is no noticable performance gain.

Then you have to consider refragmentation. Its okay testing your HDD after an initial defrag, you might notice a performance gain, but you also need to look at performance over a period of time, no point in a wonderful defrag run, if after a day or 2 use files are getting fragmented again, so in order to access real performance gains, we not only need to measure performance before and after a defrag run, but keep measuring it regularly as the hdd is use reguarlaly until the next defrag run.

When it comes to file placement strategy, there is very little performance gains from XP, due to its prefetching, other OS (win 2k) you can get some gains, but I would be guessing to figures.

What is useful is looking at placement strategy to reduce refragmentation.
Some major vendors ignore it and aim to pack files in a specific order for performance gains, some leave gaps for file growth, some order lesser modified files away from free space and more regular modified files towards free space, each method has its pros and cons, some will work better in certain situations, this is one area where it comes down to individual needs and again generic benchmarks will fail, due to the diversity of placement strategies, one might improve read access, one might reduce refragmentation, one might sit the middle ground, you need to decide what is more important to you which leads me onto my last point.

You need to evaluate realistically how often you will run your chosen defragger (considering the average time for a run), I run a defragger automatically atleast once a day, someone else might only be able to run one once a week, might not have the ability to run scheduled (for example we found this issue with a workstation used for video editting, the disc was inuse (left to run overnight for weeks at a time) too much to make scheduled defrags of little use).

I hope this highlights how little importance you should put on benchmarks (because they dont look at the big picture), how much of an issue fragmentation is and why feature set of a defragger is probably more important than how well they benchmark.

Finally, I talked about your average workstation/server, I know for a fact that our old video edditing suffered from massive file fragmentation in relative terms and there going to be other people who suffer similar problems (file sharers of movie files).

 

Aaah, yes, I really should be flushing my disk caches before defragging.

 

I was referring to the question of comparing each product to the built-in windoze defragger.

Raxco does offer tools, including a tool to fragment a drive, that may be used to emulate their results.

I did this a few months ago.

But such tests are not necessary for merely comparing a product with the built-in defragger, if one understands how file szystems work. The advantages of ANY of the major defraggers over the built-in defragger are quite clear.

It's harder to compare PD vs. Diskeeper vs. O&O, etc., but, again, if one understands how file systems work, it is fairly clear which algorithms are, in general, better.

PD was quick to implement the obviously best, in general, algorithm. And they seem to have done a good job of implementing the algorithm.

The papers at the Raxco site objectively discuss the relevant factors.

Note that as of last night Amazon was selling PD for only $21.99, but stated they had only 1 copy left.

 

Well, I restored a previous defragmented data partition on my computer with Acronis True Image.
I ran PerfectDisk again. It didn't do anything. It only gave me the "Statistics" popup window, which means that the defragmentation is finished.
(I always used the SmartPlacements in the window "Defragment Strategy Selection".)

And this is what I expected.
As far as I know backup writes byte-by-byte on another harddisk and restores it back byte-by-byte on the target harddisk, including a previous defragmentation. Isn't that logical ?
So a defragmented restore, doesn't need to be defragmented again.

 

Not sure what you mean by byte-by-byte but ATI will not (in this context) image all sectors, only those with data.

But, yeah, it's logical, one way or the other ATI apparently laid the data right back down where it got it from.

At https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=112864, you will find:

I believe Howard Kaikow was taking Acronis to task for using the term "sector-by-sector" in a too loose and misleading way and I totally agree with that criticism. Acronis' response was less than satisfactory. Although they clarified what they meant they didn't acknowledge that a "sector-by-sector" image, in its correct sense, is NOT performed on a drive by ATI when the file system is recognized. I think there was a slight language hurtle not being cleared in that case.

 

Hello, I am currently using diskeeper Pro version 9.0 and its very good and very fast! I dont know why the others said it hangs on large files when it dont for me and i got over 40Gigs worth of VOB files took me less than 15 min to defrag. Thats how good of a job the frag shield definitely works takes a bit of time if you got a large drive to set up the frag shield but its worth it. Now sometimes on files larger than a gig I usually dont have to defrag as often cause it allocates the files so well. Any ways I just got the 30 day trial of Perfect Disk filled out the forms and all that. Installed it ran it and wasnt impressed at all. I made sure that diskeeper was disabled. Initially did a scan and it found no fragmentation, however i wanted to try it anyway,
and it seemed to hang major, especially on my Large drive.
Ran it several times to see if it would speed up significantly as it should but not really...Hangs a bit. With diskeeper Pro i get no hang its done in a split sec )

 

TI documentation explicitly states that sectors are not necessarily restored to the same locations.

Dfragging with a product such as Perfect Disk is oh so easy. Indeed, last night, just after I installed build 3625, I discovered that when I formatted my drives as NTFS in Feb, the cluster sizes did not default to the expected value.

So, I've been "awake" for over 24 hours now. Last night I used Partition Magic to resize the clusters on 5 of the 9 NTFS drives. I then used Perfect Disk to defrag ALL 10 drives (9 NTFS, 1 FAT 32), then I used my CompareDrives program to verify that nothing was lost. I had just backe up with build 3657 just before installing build 3625.

Heck, I'm now too wound up to go to bed!

 

PerfectDisk - for those times when Jolt Cola isn't enough...

 

A few years ago, I tested PerfectDisk, DiskKeeper and O&O defrag. I have to say they don't necessarily do the same job. ExecSoft will defrag fragmented files very quickly and is rather basic in its approach. O&O and Raxco can let you specify other options that should help subsequent defragmentation passes if you do them often enough. Both offer to place files in a set order such as most stable files at the beginning, more often updated files in the middle and often modified files at the end. They also allow you to specify if files should be contiguous (no gaps between them). All this requires more moving around but, once done, should help files be less prone to fragmentation. They also allow boot-time defragmentation to defrag the system files. They all offer scheduling so you're not affected but defrag passes.

In the tests, DisKeeper was the fastest by far but that was to be expected considering it does less than the two other. Between O&O Defrag and Raxco's PerfectDisk, PD was much faster by an appreciable margin. Of course all tests were on the same system with near identical conditions.

My other consideration was support. Raxco even had a rep on some Usenet conference that responded to queries which is something I've very rarely seen. I can't say if that is still true as I don't have as much time reading all the stuff I used to read then. While the updates are not as frequent as Acronis products, Raxco makes it easy to update and informs well as to what the update is about. Normally the update is exactly that and not a 90MB full product download such as seen in Nero...