Best defrag software?

Reading an article from MaximumPC, they reviewed Vista default, Auslogics Disk Defrag, Raxco PerfectDisk 2008 and Diskeeper 2008. Their conclusion...don't waste you money as none yielded any real performance gains in their tests. They suggested (never know how reliably) to stick with the default Vista (assuming XP is similar?) defrag tool.

I use O&O personally.
 
xxkaliboyx said:
just so you guys know, Ultimate Defrag cause my system to have BSOD. so I had to reformat and reinstall =(
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What version of Ultimate Defrag? Are you sure it was Ultimate Defrag that caused the BSOD or did the BSOD just happen to occur when you were doing a defrag?

Seems odd that it would require you to reformat, are you using NTFS or FAT32?

So far I have found Ult defrag to work incredibly well.
 
Defrag? What? People still do that? :p


The last time I sat and watched the little blocks get shuffled around it was on a 486 with a ~450mb (compressed) drive.. Trying to free up a little more space to install another game :D
 
Well, I wanted to post again. I said earlier that I generally use O&O, and I have been happy with it, but I realized that I hadn't put any defrag program on my system since I reinstalled with a format on Feb 25 of this year. My main drive is 200GB. 67Gb is free and it was 73% fragmented... I am giving Ultimate Defrag a shot since I have never tried it, and I think this will make a difference.
 
I haven't defragged my 500GB drive since I got it last August. It's 92% fragmented. That's gonna take a while to fix. Hopefully Silent Hunter 3's putrid load times will get a little better.
 
The new Ultimate Defragger 2008 that came out recently ...it defrags better than other brand defraggers & needs only about 1% of free Harddrive space & is faster than the previous versions.
 
kennard said:
Reading an article from MaximumPC, they reviewed Vista default, Auslogics Disk Defrag, Raxco PerfectDisk 2008 and Diskeeper 2008. Their conclusion...don't waste you money as none yielded any real performance gains in their tests. They suggested (never know how reliably) to stick with the default Vista (assuming XP is similar?) defrag tool.

I use O&O personally.
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I read the same article. I wouldnt waste my money, you will see 1-2% at best improvement over XP or Vistas built in defraggers most even make it worse, although you will have a Hard Drive with 0% defragmentation.

Just run windows defrag before going to bed.
 
As mentioned previously, Vista defrags itself when it's necessary, there is no user intervention required, ever. And "necessary" would be anytime it's idle and gets to it aside from other idle background tasks, and I think the fragmentation hitting 5% or something close to it can also trigger the defrag run.

This is another situation where the defaults for the OS work fine and as designed, tinkering with them or trying to "get around" them by using even more software is a bit ridiculous.
 
Maybe we XP users like to tinker with things. Vista users have lived with XP the last 5 years it is only natural to find defrag tools also!

I tried out both Ultimate Defrag and Perfect Disk. I have used Diskeeper forever but don't like the DKService (i do not have any need for scheduled defragging). I noticed Perfect disk has many memory-resident apps running, more so than DK. Ultimate Defrag seems to be the lightest of the bunch.
 
I was reading through this thread and grew curious about the UltimateDefrag, so I forced myself through the infomercial of a site they have. Anyway, I was planning on testing out the free trial on my system to see how I like it. I'm running Vista 64 though and a couple of you have been mentioning some not very good things about it with 64-bit version. Is there anyone who's used this program successfully on Vista 64? Or has the new 2008 version maybe fixed any issues?
 
another +1 for ultimate defrag. i've been using it for a while now and it's the best defrag app i've used so far.

i've tried O&O and i really liked their GUI, but the program ramdomly locked up, so that was a no go.

i now use auslogics disk defrag for quick defrag because it is insanely fast and ultimate defrag when i need to sort/place files on the hdd to maximize its efficiency.
 
Javvis said:
The new Ultimate Defragger 2008 that came out recently ...it defrags better than other brand defraggers & needs only about 1% of free Harddrive space & is faster than the previous versions.
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How do you know that unless you ran accurate tests of each and every defrag software available?
 
PerfectDisk is good, give it a try if you haven't already.

It's got a clean interface, fast AND thorough defrag.
 
oh this is an easy one...


Def. auslogic... get the boost speed one that includes one button checkup and it even does registry defrag system cleaning and a lot lot more!!!



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This is one area where I've never been able to come to any decisive conclusions. Information on defrag programs varies wildly and often seems to boil down to personal preference. I've read that some are next to worthless (Auslogics) or can even cause problems. Based on the research I've done, JKdefrag/Mydefrag and Defraggler looked like the best of the free defraggers but I've also read that the Win7 native defrag has been improved over the ones included in previous versions of Windows. Some claim that 3rd party defragging tools can bring significant performance gains while others say that it's not a big deal and the built-in defragger will do the job just fine.

This topic doesn't interest me as much as in years past, since I now use an SSD for my boot drive, but I'd still like to know what the best defrag program for my data/storage disks would be. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer! :confused:
 
imyourzero said:
but I've also read that the Win7 native defrag has been improved over the ones included in previous versions of Windows.
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I have an SSD for boot now so defragging is not as important as it used to be. And it never seemed clear to me how much of an effect defragging had. But when I do defrag my mechanical data drive I like to got the whole hog, i.e defrag MFT as well as all of the files and directories.

The feature I always like to have in a defrag program is that it tell you details about the MFT of the your drive. The percentage in use, etc, so you can see if it is about to fragment.

This could be done for free with Windows XP and Vista defrag. But this seems to have changed in Windows 7, I don't know whether by design or a bug. The MFT is always shown as being 100% used. See the thread I posted with print outs for the same driver from XP and Windows defrag.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1487706

Anyone know of another preferably free defrag program that gives details about MFT usage and size?
 
I liked Ultimate Defrag's file placement feature - it allows you to place more frequently used files and folders on the outer (faster) portions of the disk.

I'm not sure how this works on drives with multiple platters (which is most drives) because there are multiple outer rings... this feature would be useless if the program didn't recognize this.

Thus... if that feature actually works, then Ultimate Defrag might be quite awesome. I never really tried anything beyond their trial though...
 
Archmage said:
I liked Ultimate Defrag's file placement feature - it allows you to place more frequently used files and folders on the outer (faster) portions of the disk.

I'm not sure how this works on drives with multiple platters (which is most drives) because there are multiple outer rings... this feature would be useless if the program didn't recognize this.

Thus... if that feature actually works, then Ultimate Defrag might be quite awesome. I never really tried anything beyond their trial though...
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Defraggers with a pretty picture of where the files are on a disk may also ignore the remapping of bad blocks as well. The logical position of a file on a hard disk (that is, what the hard drive reports to the OS about where a file resides) does not equal the physical position on the disk.

I am not sure there is any software that reports the actual physical location of files on a hard drive, because I think software is not allowed to get at that information.
 
Yea... I was worried about that. Even if we accept that the graphic is accurate with respect to the position on one platter, the program may not account for other platters.

In any case... Ultimate Defrag does have the most customization I've ever seen in a defrag program. I suppose it may not be worth the effort to use it, but there are tutorials for the program on Youtube so some people must be convinced it works.

It's not worth my time to figure it out...
 
I like MyDefrag. It used to be called jkdefrag, but is now closed-source. Still very simple. Nothing flashy and gets the job done.
 
I used jkdefrag for quite a long time, but after giving Disktrix Ultimatedefrag a try, man, what a difference.
 
Are 3rd party defraggers even worth it anymore? I mean back in the XP days I could understand, but now-a-days I'd be highly skeptical as to whether or not some 3rd party defrager would be any better than the built-in option. I mean, do they really offer any performance benefits over the built-in defragger?

Anyone who thinks otherwise, I'm all for hearing your side of the story, but please let's see some proof other than "it just feels snappier."
 
Jon55 said:
Are 3rd party defraggers even worth it anymore? I mean back in the XP days I could understand, but now-a-days I'd be highly skeptical as to whether or not some 3rd party defrager would be any better than the built-in option. I mean, do they really offer any performance benefits over the built-in defragger?

Anyone who thinks otherwise, I'm all for hearing your side of the story, but please let's see some proof other than "it just feels snappier."
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Aside from MyDefrag using the Window defrag api, it works much, much faster and has a few more options.
 
There is no point to using a third-party defragger with Windows 7. The background defragger in Win7 is good enough that you should not even concern yourself with defragging anymore. Speed is irrelevant when it just gets done during idle times. More options are just placebos that make the user feel better while accomplishing nothing in the way of performance.

I expect a lot of fans of defragger software (and the writers of said defraggers) will be very unhappy about that.
 
I turn off the built-in defragger because the constant hard drive noise is f'ing annoying when I'm trying to get to sleep.

As for 'more options are just placebos', please cite your sources. There are obvious reasons why some behaviours could improve performance, and unless you can show otherwise, I'll take logic over a statement devoid of any actual information.

That said, I suspect the difference they make is pretty minimal in all but the most pathological cases. Still, given the choice, I will use the superiour tool.
 
evilsofa said:
There is no point to using a third-party defragger with Windows 7. The background defragger in Win7 is good enough that you should not even concern yourself with defragging anymore. Speed is irrelevant when it just gets done during idle times. More options are just placebos that make the user feel better while accomplishing nothing in the way of performance.

I expect a lot of fans of defragger software (and the writers of said defraggers) will be very unhappy about that.
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Exactly. Defragging is just another "performance tweak" that has been carried from the XP mentality into the modern OS. For the longest time, people ran XP and had been told, via their tech friends/gamers/forum posts that defragging will "speed up ur games". And on some level that was probably true at the time. But with Vista and now 7's vastly improved built-in defragger (not to mention much, MUCH, better system maintenance), people don't have to be so ADD about monitoring their systems. Windows 7 is very intelligent and can handle this stuff for you, and adapt to how you use your computer.

And anyone complaining about hard drive noise needs a new hard drive. That's not the built-in defraggers fault.
 
evilsofa said:
There is no point to using a third-party defragger with Windows 7. The background defragger in Win7 is good enough that you should not even concern yourself with defragging anymore. Speed is irrelevant when it just gets done during idle times. More options are just placebos that make the user feel better while accomplishing nothing in the way of performance.

I expect a lot of fans of defragger software (and the writers of said defraggers) will be very unhappy about that.
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Have you ever done an HDTune bench? The front of the drive is considerably faster than the back. The default Windows Defragger doesn't move anything towards the front. Not to mention that grouping certain things together can help due to latency.

Also it doesn't do much when SSD users like myself turn off automatic defragging, which still works on a schedule.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Have you ever done an HDTune bench? The front of the drive is considerably faster than the back. The default Windows Defragger doesn't move anything towards the front. Not to mention that grouping certain things together can help due to latency.

Also it doesn't do much when SSD users like myself turn off automatic defragging, which still works on a schedule.
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The "front of the drive"? Where do you think that is?
 
evilsofa said:
The "front of the drive"? Where do you think that is?
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The outermost portions of the platter(s).

I too would like to know if UltimateDefrag is able to perform its optimizations on disks with multiple platters. If not, it's more or less useless (inefficient at best) since most modern drives consist of multiple platters.
 
Multiple platters doesn't really affect anything. Data is striped across platters by the disk firmware, and the heads can't move independently so there's nothing special to be done on the software side.
 
evilsofa said:
The "front of the drive"? Where do you think that is?
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I take it you have never seen an HDTune bench. :rolleyes: You know exactly what I mean, well I should hope so if you have been posting here for three years.

imyourzero said:
The outermost portions of the platter(s).

I too would like to know if UltimateDefrag is able to perform its optimizations on disks with multiple platters. If not, it's more or less useless (inefficient at best) since most modern drives consist of multiple platters.
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Much like raid it just stripes across the platters. Look at any benchmark of a drive with multiple platters or a raid0 array, performance drops off at the end of the drive/array.
 
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