• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Defragmentation

darktiger

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2007
Joined
Apr 10, 2003
Messages
11,819
So what defrag tools do you all use? And are you happy with it?
 
PerfectDisk works extremely well, was introduced to it by some people in the OS forum and I am very impressed with it.

Highly recommended.
 
I just use the built-in WinXP defragmenter along with the free SysInternals PageDfg application.
 
Built MS one for me, it's free and works. Im sure you can get an extra boost from 3rd party defragers (because they arrange files better) but Im sure its not that much like 1 or 2%. Although I wish it would defrag the system files but oh well not really a complaint, I keep my pc pretty clean.
 
I was a Diskeeper fan for a long time, but I gave PerfectDisk a try for Vista, and it's working great.
 
I just picked up Ultimate Defrag and I am not too impressed with it. I did the defrag that I was told to do to increase the loading speed of the 2 games I play and it didn't seem to make a shred of difference. I am going to tinker with it some more over the next 28 days(30-day free trial), and see if I can get it to do what it says it is suppose to.
 
XP's default defragmenter.

IMO getting a defrag app, antivirus, firewall, spyware app, tweaking apps, and a whole lot of other "optimizing software" will just slow down a PC rather than improve it. Now all I have on my computer are essential programs, nothing else, and my computer is working just fine.

Are there actually benchmarks out there that these defragers are more effective? What proves that diskeeper or O&O are better? I know that they're way faster than the XP defrager, but besides that?
 
I just use the sys defrag that comes with windows. Suits me just fine, however I'm not too happy about not being able to see progress in Vista's.
 
XP's default defragmenter.

IMO getting a defrag app, antivirus, firewall, spyware app, tweaking apps, and a whole lot of other "optimizing software" will just slow down a PC rather than improve it. Now all I have on my computer are essential programs, nothing else, and my computer is working just fine.

Are there actually benchmarks out there that these defragers are more effective? What proves that diskeeper or O&O are better? I know that they're way faster than the XP defrager, but besides that?
O&O can optimize your disk to how often you use a program.
 
with O&O you can also schedule offline defrag which will allow you to defragment the drive before the OS loads so system files can be moved around.
and you can set it to sort the files by Name, Access date and Modified date
 
with O&O you can also schedule offline defrag which will allow you to defragment the drive before the OS loads so system files can be moved around.
Diskeeper has done that for 8 years now, and PerfectDisk does it as well.
 
Just to throw this out since it gets lost in the shuffle as newer members join and older posts fall by the wayside, here's a test I did in the recent past and my results. YMMV, of course, which is always the case.

PerfectDisk is the only thing I recommend, period.

As for stopping, it hurts nothing; it merely stops the defragmentation process wherever it was. You can always start again later, and the defrag app will typically do another analysis pass, note everything that's notfragmented, and start from that point - it won't typically remember where it left off, and since it's running another analysis pass, that would be pointless anyway.

It's best to run an analysis pass before every defrag, especially if you're trying to pick up from where you left off. This ensures the total defragmentation of a drive at any given time when the defrag is begun.

In my own testing, PerfectDisk (v8 is the latest) stomps Diskeeper (v2007 is the latest) and O&O Defrag (v8.5 is the latest) into the ground, both of 'em. Neither of the competitor's products could defrag a specially created 20GB image file I have with 259,000 fragments from 4K files.

I created it specifically for testing defragmentation software using a tiny command line defragger tool that has a "reverse" mode and can purposely fragment a drive like crazy - it's called a "shotgun" fragmenter because when it's done, it's like taking all those files, putting them on CDs/DVDs, and holding it at the end of a 12 gauge shotgun and pulling the trigger: the files get blasted all over the place in tiny pieces. :)

PerfectDisk v8 defragmented the entire partition in 1 hour 5 mins and in one single pass. Diskeeper v2007 took over 9 hours and required 7 passes. O&O v8.5 took 12 hours and 17 mins and 11 passes to fully defragment the drive back to 0% fragmentation.

This was all done on a Core 2 Duo 1.66 GHz laptop, 2GB of PC2-4200 RAM, 160GB SATA I 5400 rpm drive with XP Pro SP2, NTFS.

Maybe someday I should post the results with a bunch of pretty piecharts and schtuffz... :D

Now that I don't have that laptop anymore, I duplicated the results of that test a few weeks ago, same 20GB shotgun-blasted-to-hell image I have safely stored on a DVD+R, restored to a clean 60GB 7200 rpm 8MB WD drive.

The results took longer as this base machine is just a P4 2.4 GHz (533 MHz FSB) with 1GB of DDR333, but the resulting times scaled across the board almost perfectly considering the lower performance machine as far as the CPU/RAM were concerned. The hard drive obviously eats that 5400 rpm drive in the laptop across the board, but it was close because of the 160GB laptop drive's areal density on the platters.

PerfectDisk 8.0.0.54 was the version I used to do the testing (they're up to 8.0.0.58 as of a few days ago) so I don't expect major speed differences between the incremental updates. Either way, PerfectDisk basically slams the door shut on the competition in my book. If those performance results don't prompt you to do some testing on your own (you can use the trial versions yanno), then nothing will. :p

'Nuff typed.
 
O&O can optimize your disk to how often you use a program.

with O&O you can also schedule offline defrag which will allow you to defragment the drive before the OS loads so system files can be moved around.
and you can set it to sort the files by Name, Access date and Modified date

That's all sounds great, the more features it has the more people will fall for the defragger and the better it will sell, but what I want to know is how much of an advantage does this give over the default XP defrager? When I have 400 gigs of data and software will it make a big difference that a few megs of system files can be moved around?

The default defrager on windows XP defrags, and I am convinced that no other defrager will give me an extra 10fps in my fps games, or make PS load 2 seconds faster. If anyone can convince me otherwise, I might get another defragger software, but I don't think that's likely to happen.
 
That's all sounds great, the more features it has the more people will fall for the defragger and the better it will sell, but what I want to know is how much of an advantage does this give over the default XP defrager? When I have 400 gigs of data and software will it make a big difference that a few megs of system files can be moved around?

The default defrager on windows XP defrags, and I am convinced that no other defrager will give me an extra 10fps in my fps games, or make PS load 2 seconds faster. If anyone can convince me otherwise, I might get another defragger software, but I don't think that's likely to happen.

To me 3rd party defraggers are important for their off line defrag function on FAT32 drives. On fat32 a folder is like a file but it can't be moved during a normal defrag, Hence even though there is 0% fragmentation you will eventually end up with folder entries scattered around the partition and the moment you copy in big files they get sliced up by the folders. This dramatically increases chance of failure should data recovery needs to be run on the drive as the more a file is diced up across the drive the more difficult it is for recovery programmes to stitch them together into one piece.
 
That's all sounds great, the more features it has the more people will fall for the defragger and the better it will sell, but what I want to know is how much of an advantage does this give over the default XP defrager?

Very little.

You can notice the difference between an extremely fragmented system and a defragged system. You can't tell the difference between a 99% defragged system and a 100% defragged system.

IMHO, it just isn't worth the $30-$50 for these products
 
I started using JkDefrag a while back after getting tired of purchasing defrag software. Defragging gives such a little benefit on the typical system, it's not worth buying software for IMO. I started using JkDefrag because it's free, open source as well as small and lightweight, and theres a command line version included so you can just schedule a task or make a script to run it whenever. It's not really pretty, but just as effective as anything else in my experience.
 
bbz_Ghost, can you test Auslogics Disk Defrag with your little test? It's free and is really quick, but I'd like to know how it compares with the commercial defraggers. http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/

3 hours 17 minutes, compared to PerfectDisk again pulling out the win in 2 hours 2 minutes (again, I'm on a slower machine now, nowhere near as fast as that original Core 2 Duo and DDR2 RAM sooooo...

Again, YMMV.
 
I started using JkDefrag because ... and theres a command line version included so you can just schedule a task or make a script to run it whenever.
You can do the same thing with the built-in WinXP defrag applet.
 
PerfectDisk! The only thing is that my laptop's boot time doesn't seem to be improved by using the Offline Defragment. That may be because of a slow 5400RPM drive, but I don't know that for sure. And I'm not trying BootVis on this, especially after what happened with my desktop. And besides, BootVis is for XP only, isn't it?
 
3 hours 17 minutes, compared to PerfectDisk again pulling out the win in 2 hours 2 minutes (again, I'm on a slower machine now, nowhere near as fast as that original Core 2 Duo and DDR2 RAM sooooo...

Again, YMMV.
Thank you.
 
And besides, BootVis is for XP only, isn't it?

Correctamundo. Win2K doesn't have prefetch, but even so PerfectDisk still runs circles around both Diskeeper and O&O there as well. With Vista, PerfectDisk still offers the option to allow it to control all the layout.ini related information and work with the SuperFetch program loading acceleration data, but not necessarily with the other aspects of SuperFetch itself (ReadyBoost, etc).

But Bootvis is strictly an XP-only tool, yep.
 
I have probably tried a dozen different defragmenters over the years and PerfectDisk really is better that any of them. I have 14 HD’s in my current system with 11 of those in 2 Raid 5 setups. They are to store large files and do not have to be defraged but 3 or 4 times a year to sort out folders. I just let it work overnight. I do use it regularly for my boot drive and the 2 other drives that handle most of my work load. A lot of files being moved and deleted. It does make a difference with PerfectDisk compared to the other programs.
 
That Ultimate Defrag program I tried did not seem to live up to it's promises. I have uninstalled it and gone back to the built-in defragger. I will admit that it did a nice job of defragging, but I really didn't notice any benifits in my games like was promised(moving all my game data to the outer edge did almost nothing), or in the load times of my programs. I did notice that it was able to defrag my goofed up pagefile though, I made my page file a little bigger and my drive got an instant frag to it.

Other than that, I was not impressed.
 
Back
Top