Paragon Total Defrag 2009

Paragon Total Defrag 2009 released

http://www.paragon-software.com/newsletter/080731.html

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/total-defrag/

Screenshots:
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/total-defrag/screenshots.html

 

actually looks pretty nice.. i may give it a try to see.

 

paragon software is always very decent.

 

I just tried it. It took over an hour to just analyze the System drive. It has to reboot to do that even. You can't stop it once it starts....the directions say press Ctl C, but when you do up pops a message stating that you will damage your system drive if you interrupt.

 

I read reports that in the earlier version if the boot time defrag had any errors, or got interrupted (lets say crash or power failure, quite possible) the disk could get corrupted. That is not very good and I'm not sure its preventable with a low level defrag.

At least when you do it under Windows NTFS protects against disaster as its transacted.

 

Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 - not recommended

I bought this based on good past experience with Paragon's Hard Disk Manager with XP. I'm now using Vista Business, where the Windows defragmenter runs in a secretive mode (no frag map, so you can't see if it does anything or not). My all time favorite defragmenter is Diskeeper, but their version for Vista Business is $50, while the same program for Vista Home is $30, and I find this arbitrary price difference unreasonable. So, when I got an email from Paragon offering their 2009 defragmenter for a special price of $20, I jumped on it. Shame on me for not checking here first.

The program will do nothing on the C drive without a reboot--not even "analyze" can be done in Windows. My first attempt at defrag on C (57GB, 21GB free space) took about two hours, after which the program showed the drive to be just as fragmented as before--maybe even worse.

Just in case...I ran the Windows disk check, which found no errors on the C drive. With 30% of the drive free, defragmenting should have been no problem. My paging file is on D, so that is not an issue. All my data is on separate drives, so C is strictly OS and programs.

The D drive, with 23 out of 112GB free, and where the paging file resides, required a restart also, but at least it did defrag nearly completely.

Finally, my third hard drive, a Maxtor 500GB running on an add-in SATA card, with 165GB, also wants a restart to defrag. I've not tried it. The program shows this as a SCSI drive.

Just starting the program runs into the Vista UAC confirmation, so maybe it's not Microsoft API compliant. I don't know if this is "version 1 syndrome" or just a bad program. In any case, it is so dramatically inferior to Diskeeper, that Diskeeper's arbitrary pricing is beginning to look not so bad. I will today ask for a refund.

 

...all the more mysterious because I used Total Defrag 2007 under VISTA with no problems. I think I actually preferred it to PeerfectDisk 2008, which I am now using and am happy with.
I don't have 2009, but Paragon's email reminded me to download Drive Backup 9.0, which I have tried now, and it seems to function just as flawlessly as 8.5 did, so I know the people at paragon know how to make a VISTA compatrable app.

Maybe it is worth a contact to their support before giving up.

 

Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 - not recommended

That is the exact same problems I had. The only difference is I am running XP SP3.

Ultimate Defrag is the best I have tested so far. Perfectdisk does not place the files on the outside of the drive. I have both.