Which Disk Defragmenter?

I started out with O&O. It was good, but not the best. Then I moved to Diskeeper. I liked Diskeeper and it did its job better than O&O. Eventually my liscence ran out and I wanted something new. I moved to PerfectDisk. Its by far the best defrag tool I have ever used. It allows smart placement of your files, you can compress the unused space and defrag what you have. It works excellent. It also has boot time defragging which helps alot with the MFT.

 

Hi Pete,

it will have as last access date Jan 1 2008. It will not be modified unless you open that file.

-Here are 2 great freewares for modifying the attributes of files/directories. I was in a research about something like this on June, because I do not like the way PD2008 handles the files on the non system partitions, specially the huge ones (>1gb).
Attribute Changer 6.0a
SetFileDate 2.0


Panagiotis

 

"Smart Placement" is just a Raxco buzzword.

 

Right? So they took the time to incorporate a smart placement button into their program that does nothing?

Smart placement is putting the files in order according to their last access time. The longer ago you used a file the further in the back of the cluster it will go since it doesnt get used much. The more commonly used files go up front for quick access.

Most paid for defragers do that.

 

You are mistaken about this one. Smart Placement orders the files from the oldest created/modified to the newest. It does not take in account the last access date.
This means that on the faster tracks will be placed those files that are almost never modified and in the slower tracks will be placed your newly created files and those that are modified more frequently.
With PD you do not gain speed at your most often tasks on the contrary you loose it.
PD defragmentation method is great for servers but is almost useless on a common use modern system.
On the other hand Puran Defrag and Smart Defrag will speed your drive, since they place 1st the directories, 2nd the last accessed files, 3rd a small free space (1-2gb) which will be used for the temp files and the more frequently modified files, 4th every other file and 5th a large free space chunk.

ps. I have a PD 2008 and RX suite license with support for the next 2 years but if Raxco does not listen to their customers I'm going to change. What the heck I had requested to have the ability to defrag a folder with all the files and to exclude files by size from last year (version 8 ) and still nothing on the horizon.
Puran Defrag here I come....

Panagiotis

 

Pete what scanner doesw this ? The only programs I have found that mess up the archive are backup programs. If I run Prevx for example then nothing changes. Of course I only run them on demand. If you have scanners installed is this why they mess things up ? changing dates etc

 

Thanks

Just downloaded Avira. Fired up Shadow Defender. Installed and ran avira. Found nothing. checked with UD and yes a whole bunch of dlls had been cahnged. Rebooted and back to normal. another reason to avoid av

 

What I mean is, Smart Placement is just Raxco's word for the optimization feature that a lot of defrag programs have.

 

Exactly. Most defraggers just call it what it is. Sorting by name,size,recency etc.

Its just a name that gets the product sold. Lile ultimatedefrag has an auto mode which they don't give a fancy name but it is smarter than perfectdisks smartplacement.

 

How is it good for servers?

Is there any other defragger which does this (e.g. JkDefrag)?

Thanks

 

You 're welcome.

Panagiotis

 

For the following reasons:

a) pd2008 offers the most thorough defragmentation. It consolidates the free space better than the other defraggers; and from some tests I made I found that when you have hundreds of thousands of directories and small files it really improoves the seek and loading times.

b) the files on a server do not get modified as often as on a home pc. And PD2008 SMARTPlacement is focused on reducing the future fragmentation. This means that you update your server, you defrag and it will not become heavily fragmented again until your new major update of the files.

None that I know.

Ontrack used a similar techinc on it's fixit-utilities/systemsuite but abbandoned it when XP SP1 came out and then sold those products at V-COM. (ontrack's method was even more advanced since it monitored the execution of the applications and put the exes and their related dlls closer together)

ps. If I am not mistaken, I think that Smart Defrag beta was the product that used first this method and Puran defrag adopted it under the name PIOZR (maybe optimized it further?).

Panagiotis

 

Does anyone know if Copernic Desktop Search or any of the other Desktop Search programs modify the last access time when they index the files?

Many thanks,

Silver

 

Thanks for the explanation!

 

Does that "offline defrag", logically useful for C drive, actually work in O&O Defrag v11 ? I'm not saying that it used to work in previous versions for I've tried none but it's certainly not working for me.

Creating a job for Complete / NAME (as they suggest you do it for C drive --- offline defragmentation so it can access locked files) does nothing on reboot (some STEALTH defrag is being done sometimes on reboot but that's regardless of a job being present).

If I choose not to reboot, the Complete / NAME job doesn't really do anything .. it analyses the C drive, it comes to the conclusion that's 9.xx % fragmented, "defragments" it up to a 8.yy % .I can clearly see that it's not defragmenting anything since the cluster look almost identical before/after and the process ends at approx 60%, it never reaches 100% as it does with the other partitions (not via a job but manually).

Can anyone shed light onto this matter ? Should task scheduler be enabled ? If it should why doesn't the program let you know that ?

It's odd to say the least, the job/offline thingie.The non-functionality of it certainly made me waste alot of time trying to properly deframent C drive.

 

Offline defrag on O&O is always in stealth mode as far as I know and it works out fine.

 

If anyone is interested, I just got a reply from Copernic Support that stated that Copernic does not modify the last access time when indexing.

Silver

 

Thanks silver. I was considering using Copernic but would not if it modified the last accessed time. The other methods used by UD2008 are not bad but last accessed with folder/file name is the best for me.

 

That's a logical inconsistency there ... how does it work fine in "STEALTH" mode if I "program" the job to be COMPLETE / Name ?

The two (according to their documentation) are totally diffferent algorithms.

Not to mention that the drive is identically fragmented after the "working fine" STEALTH mode, which takes about 10 to 15 seconds at most, hardly the necessary time for a thorough defragmentation of 9.75% .

 

Offline defrag for O&O only follows stealth strategy and nothing else. You can only program for online.

 

Ultimate Defrag 2008 almost mangled my drive yesterday. I was trying to consolidate my C: drive by modification date, but it left a couple huge spaces, so I tried it again and this time it left a huge space at the front of the drive. After two more tries with the same alternating result, I noticed that my MFT was in 3800 pieces , which slowed down file access to a crawl, so I did an MFT defrag with Paragon defrag. After rebooting, I loaded up the freeware version of Ultimate Defrag which worked perfectly.

 

Have you tried UD2008 since ? my guess is that it would now work perfectly and give better results than the free version. Sounds like you needed to do an offline defrag fist.

 

Longview,

I use the same defrag setup. You will like Copernic. I have tried them all and Copernic is the best for me.

Silver