Which Disk Defragmenter?

Perfectdisk all the way. I love the offline system file defragger.

 

Two more to add to the list of failures.

Puran Defrag
Smart Defrag

Smart defrag lowered it from 17% to 15%.

No security software is running on the computer. So nothing should be locking those files.

 

If JkDefrag works, and you just don't like the standard interface (or lack of it), you could try one of the GUI's available. Check the website, scroll down.

Although you should note that you can run JkDefrag in cmd, where you have more options.

 

Hi Coolio,

have you run a checkdisk? It seams that something is wrong with your mft.

If there is a problem on the files table or there are bad clusters the defrag will fail/stop for not damaging your files.

Panagiotis

 

How to run it?

O&O did report an error before but it continued to defrag anyway.

 

Puran's boottime defrag starts off with checkdisk first

 

I found out how .

 

I made the mistake of buying PerfectDisk 2008 for VmWare. After the latest update, it crashed on all three of my systems while analyzing.

I will now try Smart Defrag and Puran.

PerfectDisk is off my system!!

Silver

 

I just started trying Puran and it's pretty nice. Works quickly and I like all the boot time options. Price is pretty darn good too. Will try it for the full period, but so far, so good!

 

Hi Coolio10,
Don't mean to nitpick, but there is no I-FAAST in the Home and Pro editions of Diskeeper 2008. I-FAAST is found only in the ProPremier and Server editions. I-FAAST needs to monitor file activity for a while (~1 week) before sequencing the files. Benefits from I-FAAST depend on the specific system and can vary between (approx) 10-80%. All of this is done automatically without any user intervention.

if you are interested, here is some more information on how I-FAAST works
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2006/09/inside_ifaast.html
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2006/11/comparing_ifaas.html

Best regards

 

MST Software just recently release version 3 of Mst Defrag. I have always liked it in the past. Has anyone used it yet? I have but I cannot tell if it is effectective or not. Any opinions on it?

 

Smart Defrag all the way.

 

I tried Smart Defrag moving away from Jk.

We have 2 Acer 2303's and I noticed that the PC was spiking at 15-20% every 3 secs on both even with the background defrag turned off. We have Avira suite on all PCs.

Exiting SD was the answer.

Back to Jk using JkDefragGUI to do a defrag 5mins after log-on.

Didn't notice any change in performance.

On my son's Dell 8300 3Ghz P4 I didn't notice any discernible spikes.

Anybody else seeing spikes?

Ian

 

smart defrag.

 

Now I am trialing O&O Defrag v11. Has almost everything that UD has, plus offline defrag. Much faster than PerfectDisk.

 

Best part is the flexible strategy to defrag, so for your boot drive you can set it to do a complete/name and for your data drive you can set it to complete/modified. The background monitoring feature is another plus, it automatically files as they are added on the fly leading to far less need of total defrags.

 

answers clearly on my Sig

 

I am still using Diskeeper 10 Home on my remaining XP machine.

IMHO it offers the best efficiency (measured in terms of defrag time over refragmentation and offers intelligent scheduling options and is unobtrusive.

JK Defrag, Perfectdisk and Ultimate defrag, all reduced refragmentation rates compared to Diskeeper 10 (and XP built in defrag), but all took an un-proportional rate of time to defragment (eg Perfectdisk almost halved refragmentation, but took over 3 times as long to defrag, so I could afford to run diskeeper 10 twice as often to maintain similar levels of refragmentation and still not accumulate as much defragmentation time).

After trying Diskeeper 2007 and MST defrag I was not keen on the realtime idea, as they seemed to spend ages defragging files that just refragmented again; though I did not run any tests, I suspect they were wasting too much time repeatedly defragging things like temp files that were continuously altered and/or deleted.

I will mention this again as its important:

You need to test the different defragmentation tools as some work better in different scenarios and in some cases fail to work correctly due to unique situations, there is no-one best defragmentation tool.
Ignore the hype about performance gains, test yourself, draw your own conclusions.

I left my hdd on my development machine for 1 full month after an initial defrag.
It accumulated 4000 fragmented files.
Those files had a 14% performance loss when reading end-to-end (e.g. not real world random access).
14% performance loss sounds a lot, but that's only the fragmented files.
My drive has approx 75000 files, that's only a total file fragmentation of 0.75%.
Add into the mix that you seldom read a big chunk of files end-to-end, drive access is very random (I monitored frequent access to my page file in-between normal file reads/writes), XP has the cool prefetch feature, various caching mechanisms of the OS and most drives, this fragmentation is completely insignificant, it would take many months of usage before it will every become noticeable OR even affect productivity.
But note this is a general desktop usage scenario - P2P file downloading, movie editing, some games etc. can all cause higher rates of fragmentation, but is why you need to test, so you can look at your usage and see which tool will fit in better.

 

I noticed a difference between O&O Defrag 11 and Ultimate Defrag on both of these methods.

It appears that O&O puts the modified files on the inner part of the disk, the slowest part, rather than at the of the outer parts. UD puts them on the outer parts, the fastest part of the disk.

Can anyone explain why O&O would do it this way?

Many thanks,

Silver

 

I've trialled PerfectDisk 2008 and would give it a definite thumbs down for the following reasons:

• Speed - it was significantly slower than Windows' own defrag, even after having run it a few times. I suspect this was due to its "Smart" placement which seemed to keep defragmenting the same files (possibly moving them to different places on disk).
• UI - highly wasteful of screen space, due in large part to the ribbon interface - running this on a small screen would be a nightmare. Just because Microsoft does something doesn't make it a good idea!
• Bloat - 43MB is a lot for a utility (though when installed, it took up a more modest 30MB) but it also adds two services, one of which (PD91Agent) is totally unnecessary, as it just handles scheduling. Windows' own Task Scheduler can (and should) be used for this job. The 3 background processes (PD91Agent, PD91Scanner, PD91Engine took up 15-95MB on my system, whether PerfectDisk itself (another 25MB) was running or not.
• "SMARTplacement" - for all the brouhaha I'd expect something fairly significant. Locating large files on the outer tracks of a disk can certainly triple transfer rates in theory, yet PerfectDisk never did this. It would move some data to the centre of the drive but never to the edge (which corresponds to the end sections of the drive map) and its own performance indicators showed virtually no change over previous use of Windows' own disk defragmentation.

On the whole, plenty of blow but little to show in my experience.

 

I use Puran Defrag (http://www.puransoftware.com). It can defrag at boot or in the background at an interval of your choosing.

 

I would say Perfect Disk is my choice for now...

 

I'm torn between Puran and Smart Defrag. For some reason, Puran always opens way in the top left of my screen no matter where I close it. I still think its a great defragmenter, the window thing is just a bit annoying.


Anyone know how to get it to save its window location?

 

Nope. I'll send them an e-mail about the problem.

 

I wish i knew why Smart Defrag is so different because after trying it i notice a perf0rmance difference, maybe not earth-shattering, but surely enough to open my eyes to it and because of this i'm running dangerously torn since UD by DiskTrix is been it for me for awhile now, but i must admit i am impressed!