Defrag

Anyone use a 3rd party defrag util that is faster than Win 7's?

 

I think most of them are faster than Win 7's!

Funny you mentioned it as in the past weeks I have been vacillating between PerfectDisk Pro, O&O Defrag Pro, Diskeeper, Puran Defrag, Auslogics Pro, MyDefrag and the good ole Win7! No kidding!

Honestly, I wouldn't say I'm married to any of them, but they all seem to have their good points and eccentricities.

 

Ideally I find something that is manual and reasonably quick. Running in automatic mode isn't an option.

 

A forum member posted this link on a previous thread

-http://www.hofmannc.de/en/windows-7-defragmenter-test/

Hope it helps. Personally, I use mydefrag to just defragment non-contiguous files (no file placement, etc) every month or so on platter drives.

 

UltimateDefrag 1.72 Free from DiskTrix...still great app for W7

 

I like PerfectDisk. For me the problem with the Windows 7 built in defrag is there's no map, plus it's hard to gauge how long it will take. PerfectDisk has the classic data map and progress "gas gauge", plus it has what I think is an effective way of optimally organizing the data.

 

I've had problems with UltimateDefrag Free 1.72 in Vista. It has trouble reading the drive accurately for some reason and the drive map comes out looking all screwy. But it might just be my computer or Vista. When it works right though it's the very best free one out there in my opinion. The user's guide alone is worth downloading:

http://www.disktrix.com/manual.php

It was a little hard for me to set up. It has so many file placement options it's hard to decide which one's best. Once you get it set up though it's reasonable fast, unless you have massive amounts of data.

I used PerfectDisk Pro for awhile. It uses what it calls "smart placement" and can defrag large amounts of data fairly fast. Personally I don't care much for Raxco, the company that makes it. Once they get your email address you'll find spam in your inbox almost every day. I formatted my hard drive and unfortunately didn't save my product key, so I contacted them to see if they'd send it to me, or send me another one so I could reinstall; they said I'd have to upgrade to the latest version (for a fee of course). That's when I said bye-bye.

Right now I use Defraggler. The only file placement option it has is placing large files at the end of the drive. If you don't have large amounts of data though you don't really need file placement. I got tired of a lot of complicated options and Defraggler is very user friendly. It does have a few options for customizing defrags but I've never used them. It has boot-time defrag but honestly I can tell that it even works. The few times I've run it, it didn't seem to do anything. It has a good drive map and you can analyze then click blocks to see what files are there, a feature not often found in free derfraggers. You can also search. After the initial defrag it's reasonably fast. It places files automatically according to its own internal algorithm and compacts everything nicely on the outer sectors of the drive.

 

Great information there. We will just stick with Windows defrag based on those results.

 

Why do you say this?

I used Diskeeper for many years and it's Invisitasking automatic mode works extremely well. It lacks many features of other programs such as an intelligent file lay out (except for FAAST) which doesn't work on most file systems particulalrly if you use Volume Shadow Copy and it doesn't completely defrag your drive (it will only do so to the extent that further defragmentation will not increase your read-write speed)but as an install and forever forget about defraging it was great. Also, as a manual defragger it was extremely fast.

However I have had to stop using Diskeeper since I switched to Windows 8 on which it is quite buggy.

I have also used Perfect Disk which I did not find to be particularly fast and it's smart placement scheme based on last modified never made much sense to me. I would much prefer last accessed. It does have a boot time defragger which is very good and is good at properly placing certain Windows system files.

Auslogics defragger can be found for cheap and offers many layout schemes. It is not a speadball but it has a resource usage throttle for both cpu and memeory usage that will allow you you to work on your PC while defragging.

Presently I am using the Accelerate deefragger in Iolo System Mechanic. It's slow, I run it every night, but it claims to not only defrag individual files but also to place files that are frequently used together adjacent to or near to each other on the disk, which is unique to this program alone (patent pending).

Many claim that the need to defrag is bunk so you might just want to stay with the Windows 7 defragger.

 

The PCs in question are used by engineering staff for profiling. No automatic background tasks are allowed.

 

I use Auslogics Portable Defragger. It is easy, efficient, and (as stated by the name) portable. It defrags and optimizes.

nozzle

 

Which defrag selection do you choose to do that (with MyD)?

Cruise

 

Defragment Only included with the other MyDefrag scripts.

 

My defragger of preference is UltraDefrag as I find it provides very straight-forward selections for performing a simple defrag, drive-optimization, MFT defrag, and boot-time defrag. It is open source and under continuous development.

TS

 

perfectdisk 13 here. way to many issues with ultimate defrag for me and i own more than one lic. auslogics is okay but lacks a lot of options i like from perfectdisk. O&O defrag 17 is okay but has a few annoyances for me but overall does a great job. not a fan of defraggler really at all it leaves to much fragmented for me even though it says its done. mydefrag does do a great job with a very simplified (or more so) than others. ive tried them all really and have a lic for just about every one except diskeeper i never bothered to renew that one since im not a fan.

 

I'm currently running PerfectDisk 12.5 on Windows 7 and wondering about v13. Is the only difference compatibility with Windows 8?

 

I use Mydefrag by jerome kessels.

http://www.mydefrag.com/

 

Thoughts on the open source UltraDegrag?

http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

 

See post #14 above.

 

That question was for zfactor.

 

I haven't tried UltraDefrag, but I like the fact that it can do a boot-time defrag of the normally locked data, such as the MFT, pagefile, etc. In some products boot-time defrag is only available in the paid version.

 

sorry for the late replay i missed this thread somehow. ultrdefrag is okay imo middle of the road i guess im not a huge fan but it did okay to actually defrag a drive where others say they are defragged but stuff is still spread out around the drive. not the best but better then many others.

 

If you're using Win 7 or later, just forget about third party defrag applications.

 

@The Seeker,
Why?

On XP I always use the one in windows. But win7 doesn't have a picture of fragmentation, so I'm contemplating using defraggler from piriform. So what are the dangers of non-windows defragmenter?

 

Pardon my ignorance, but why run 3rd party defragmenters?

Windows 7 has automatic defragmentation, I've never seen more than 1% fragmentation on my drives.