Best free defrag utility?

T

ThR!LL

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2006
Messages
342
So far I have found 3 promising contenders. JkDefrag, Auslogics, and Defraggler. Which of these 3 would you pick over the others?
 
FWIW, MaxPC did benchmarks of major defrag programs vs the Vista default, and concluded the differences were virtually unnoticeable.
 
Another vote for JkDefrag. Been testing defraggers for a long long time, and as far as free ones go, that's the best of the ones available. Relatively fast, does everything necessary and requires no intervention: just run it, and when it's done it'll say "Finished" so close it. Simple.
 
Hell, JKDefrag does one welcome thing if absolutely nothing else--it automatically defrags every fixed drive you have without you having to tell it to do that. Flip side, of course, there goes a few hours...
 
Haven't used JkDefrag and I don't want one that auto defrags all my drives anyway. I liked Defraggler better than Auslogics though because it will defrag individual files and consolidate free space. It also doesn't nag you and tell you randomly that your PC needs optimization like Auslogics does when it actually doesn't. Free Auslogics defrag is just front to try to get you to buy their PC optimization software. I don't think any of them makes a marked difference in disk performance over the one already in the OS but they are a lot faster than the one Microsoft gives us and have more options. I really don't like Vista defrag not showing us any info at all when using defrag. I know nthere claimed reason but I still don't like it. Geeks like to see the blocks being moved around.
 
Is "never defrag because its pretty much pointless these days" an acceptable answer.
 
There's no reason to run a third-party defragger on Vista - Vista does it automagically during idle times when it's required or the system is having serious performance issues with fragmentation. As I've said in the past (not under this nick), I put a Vista Ultimate installation on a 40GB partition through a torture test like not many people will do:

I installed Vista Ultimate, screwed around with a variety of static pagefile sizes (with reboots between each, obviously), and then copying over 125,000 files of various sizes and types to the partition, then deleted them, then copied them back, rebooted, redid the pagefile, recopied them, redid the pagefile, deleted them, redid it, over and over again for about 4 hours.

I did that similar test under XP and after about 20 reboots/copy cycles, the file fragmentation approached 76% on that 40GB partition... pretty freakin' nasty stuff.

However...

After all that torture I put Vista through, after 4+ hours of nothing but copies, deletes, reboots, etc over and over, I still had less than 5% fragmentation. So, whatever the coders did for Vista in terms of file system management and keeping the fragmentation to a lower (much lower) level definitely works, at least from my perspective.

I've done even worse things (took a 20GB partition on a drive, copied a single 1GB pagefile - a perfect 1GB file down to the byte) and then shotgun blasted it into 255K fragments - seriously. Talk about thrashing...

Anyway, PerfectDisk was the only defragger to rebuild the data into a single file in a single pass and it did it nearly 2 hours faster than the next fastest competitior, O&O Defrag, which took 3 passes to do it to 0% fragmentation. Diskeeper? hehe Don't even bother... that stuff never has been good at defragging, I don't know why people seem to think it does/is.

Yes, I realize this thread is about free ones, sorry for the </off_topic> with this. Just wanted to toss the info out... for what it is, and it's size, JkDefrag is pretty sweet, actually. Been using it more and more lately - I don't run Vista, btw. I know people simply must believe they have to do manual defragging in Vista, but they don't, not anymore. It's simply a non-issue now, as long as people don't go fuckin' Vista's internals up with vLite-stripped installs and all sorts of god-awful "tweaks" that end up causing more problems in the long run than the imaginary benefits hint at.
 
Joe Average said:
There's no reason to run a third-party defragger on Vista - Vista does it automagically during idle times when it's required or the system is having serious performance issues with fragmentation. As I've said in the past (not under this nick), I put a Vista Ultimate installation on a 40GB partition through a torture test like not many people will do:

I installed Vista Ultimate, screwed around with a variety of static pagefile sizes (with reboots between each, obviously), and then copying over 125,000 files of various sizes and types to the partition, then deleted them, then copied them back, rebooted, redid the pagefile, recopied them, redid the pagefile, deleted them, redid it, over and over again for about 4 hours.

I did that similar test under XP and after about 20 reboots/copy cycles, the file fragmentation approached 76% on that 40GB partition... pretty freakin' nasty stuff.

However...

After all that torture I put Vista through, after 4+ hours of nothing but copies, deletes, reboots, etc over and over, I still had less than 5% fragmentation. So, whatever the coders did for Vista in terms of file system management and keeping the fragmentation to a lower (much lower) level definitely works, at least from my perspective.

I've done even worse things (took a 20GB partition on a drive, copied a single 1GB pagefile - a perfect 1GB file down to the byte) and then shotgun blasted it into 255K fragments - seriously. Talk about thrashing...

Anyway, PerfectDisk was the only defragger to rebuild the data into a single file in a single pass and it did it nearly 2 hours faster than the next fastest competitior, O&O Defrag, which took 3 passes to do it to 0% fragmentation. Diskeeper? hehe Don't even bother... that stuff never has been good at defragging, I don't know why people seem to think it does/is.

Yes, I realize this thread is about free ones, sorry for the </off_topic> with this. Just wanted to toss the info out... for what it is, and it's size, JkDefrag is pretty sweet, actually. Been using it more and more lately - I don't run Vista, btw. I know people simply must believe they have to do manual defragging in Vista, but they don't, not anymore. It's simply a non-issue now, as long as people don't go fuckin' Vista's internals up with vLite-stripped installs and all sorts of god-awful "tweaks" that end up causing more problems in the long run than the imaginary benefits hint at.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this info,very good write up! :cool:
 
Joe Average said:
It's simply a non-issue now, as long as people don't go fuckin' Vista's internals up with vLite-stripped installs and all sorts of god-awful "tweaks" that end up causing more problems in the long run than the imaginary benefits hint at.
Click to expand...

Joe Average = BBZ_Ghost?
 
/me points to that tiny little dark sig he made a Feedback post about... the one that people either miss totally or just can't read at all... ;)
 
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