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Diskeeper 2011 beta?
- Thread starter gman
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I'm honestly surprised these companies are still making defrag software, or that people are paying for it. Windows 7's defragger does a good enough job by itself, but if you feel the need to use something else, get Defraggler. It is free, and does the job.
Turd Furguson
Limp Gawd
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Not everyone runs Windows 7. And some free software out there that we may use on our home machines may violate the EULA by running on business machines without purchasing licenses.
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As far as I can tell, Defraggler is free, not just free for personal use.
To each his own. I've used everything out there and still go back to Diskeeper. I like Perfectdisk as well, but for SSDs you're only using Consolidate Free Space. Diskeeper does have Hyperfast which seems to work pretty well for my RAID drives. I use Intel's Toolbox for my single SSD and then DK's set it and forget it on my 1TB archive drive.
The defragger that comes built into Windows since XP and on is really just a "lite" version of the software made by Diskeeper Corp.
It uses the same defragmenting code back-end, just without all the pretty bells and whistles and GUI that comes with the full Diskeeper software.
It uses the same defragmenting code back-end, just without all the pretty bells and whistles and GUI that comes with the full Diskeeper software.
GushpinBob
2[H]4U
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Actually the lite Diskeeper version has been used as the built in defragger since Windows 2000, but I think Microsoft replaced it with something made in-house when Vista was released.
Joe Average
Ad Blocker - Banned
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What that "large hold across the Fortune 500 companies" actually means is someone is padding the budgets of those companies and someone is making a buck from it. 
It's primarily marketing speak that doesn't mean much in the long run. Diskeeper is in use in such places because they have long-term contracts from XP days that are still in effect so, those companies just keep right on re-allocating funds to them for their software products even in spite of the modern OSes (Vista and Windows 7) basically negating the need for a standalone third-party installed defragger.
If you went to their website, meaning Diskeeper, and they had a big disclaimer right up front on the main page that said "Vista and Windows 7 Owners: You really don't need our product since Vista and Windows 7 handle defragging internally as required. Sure, you can buy our product and get the same end result - a defragmented system - but honestly you don't need it. We're just an option if you're interested" I'm sure you'd pass on their product, now wouldn't you?
But no, the marketing speak makes it and pretty much all other products look like what they're intending: "OMFG I GOTTA BUY THIS I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT MY MACHINE WILL RUN SLOW IF I DON'T FORK OVER THE CASH RIGHT NOW THIS MILLISECOND!!!"
Seriously, Vista and Windows 7 take care of themselves extremely well but so many people just cannot break that old "I gotta defrag" mentality it's not even funny. I blame the fact that XP was on the market for so long that how people used it (and some still do) basically ingrained the idea that "I gotta defrag" is a must - it might have been pre-Vista/7 days, but that's not the case anymore.
A lot of old habits with XP die very hard when it comes to Vista and 7, but they really do need to die, and that's one of them.
Leave it alone is the concept, and the mantra, and the general idea I and many others have been promoting for a few years now. Those of us that practice it and leave the OS alone so it can take care of itself have machines that run much better and more efficiently than people who slap every damned piece of third-party software on 'em hoping they'll see some benefits.
The only tangible thing they notice is smaller bank accounts, in my experience, from all the wasted funds put into software that only serves to do just that: relieve them of their money when the OS already does what that third-party software professes to do "better."
Seems like a waste to me...
It's primarily marketing speak that doesn't mean much in the long run. Diskeeper is in use in such places because they have long-term contracts from XP days that are still in effect so, those companies just keep right on re-allocating funds to them for their software products even in spite of the modern OSes (Vista and Windows 7) basically negating the need for a standalone third-party installed defragger.
If you went to their website, meaning Diskeeper, and they had a big disclaimer right up front on the main page that said "Vista and Windows 7 Owners: You really don't need our product since Vista and Windows 7 handle defragging internally as required. Sure, you can buy our product and get the same end result - a defragmented system - but honestly you don't need it. We're just an option if you're interested" I'm sure you'd pass on their product, now wouldn't you?
But no, the marketing speak makes it and pretty much all other products look like what they're intending: "OMFG I GOTTA BUY THIS I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT MY MACHINE WILL RUN SLOW IF I DON'T FORK OVER THE CASH RIGHT NOW THIS MILLISECOND!!!"
Seriously, Vista and Windows 7 take care of themselves extremely well but so many people just cannot break that old "I gotta defrag" mentality it's not even funny. I blame the fact that XP was on the market for so long that how people used it (and some still do) basically ingrained the idea that "I gotta defrag" is a must - it might have been pre-Vista/7 days, but that's not the case anymore.
A lot of old habits with XP die very hard when it comes to Vista and 7, but they really do need to die, and that's one of them.
Leave it alone is the concept, and the mantra, and the general idea I and many others have been promoting for a few years now. Those of us that practice it and leave the OS alone so it can take care of itself have machines that run much better and more efficiently than people who slap every damned piece of third-party software on 'em hoping they'll see some benefits.
The only tangible thing they notice is smaller bank accounts, in my experience, from all the wasted funds put into software that only serves to do just that: relieve them of their money when the OS already does what that third-party software professes to do "better."
Seems like a waste to me...
The Cloud and virtualization is Diskeeper's enemy.
Diskeeper is a relic from a time when folks only had a single drive, or two individual drives (like many consumers still do). However:
That's basically snake oil right there. DK is running on the OS level, completely oblivious to what hardware the file system actually stores data on. All it can do is provide defragmentation within the file system but that is pretty much meaningless as soon as your data is stored on more than a single drive.
It is entirely possible that running DK will actually result in a loss of performance. That's certainly true for the DK Server license and virtual machines where running DK just saturates the I/O queue on the backend storage. Even on the consumer side a fragmented drive may perform better than a defragmented one since most file system data for home users is actually accessed randomly rather than sequentially (i.e. OS at the same time as games etc. etc.).
Random access of fragmented data will over time result in shorter strokes of the disk head. If the disk is defragmented longer strokes are needed to reposition the head after each file read/write. Defragmentation is great for sequential data and for single file access times but overall chaos on the drive leads to lower access times than order.
Diskeeper is a relic from a time when folks only had a single drive, or two individual drives (like many consumers still do). However:
That's basically snake oil right there. DK is running on the OS level, completely oblivious to what hardware the file system actually stores data on. All it can do is provide defragmentation within the file system but that is pretty much meaningless as soon as your data is stored on more than a single drive.
It is entirely possible that running DK will actually result in a loss of performance. That's certainly true for the DK Server license and virtual machines where running DK just saturates the I/O queue on the backend storage. Even on the consumer side a fragmented drive may perform better than a defragmented one since most file system data for home users is actually accessed randomly rather than sequentially (i.e. OS at the same time as games etc. etc.).
Random access of fragmented data will over time result in shorter strokes of the disk head. If the disk is defragmented longer strokes are needed to reposition the head after each file read/write. Defragmentation is great for sequential data and for single file access times but overall chaos on the drive leads to lower access times than order.
Joe Average
Ad Blocker - Banned
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And let's not forget "the ultimate hook" that most consumers don't even know:
The built-in defrag tools in Windows have been coded by Diskeeper since Windows 95 came out, or is using licensed code/technology from Diskeeper, and that includes the self-sufficient defrag routines in Vista and Windows 7 too...
So basically when you buy the retail version of Diskeeper, you get a few more bells and whistles, a pretty GUI that actually shows you stuff when it happens ("Ooo, see those colored blocks moving all over the place, that's how I know it's actually defragging my drive"), etc.
In the end, the exact same job gets done by using what the OS already does itself, it's just not as "shiny and pretty" as the full blown heavily bloated retail version of Diskeeper provides. When you buy it, you're buying the bloat and the packaging - the core routines are already in the OS and work as designed.
You already paid for the OS - either by buying a new machine with it pre-installed or buying it as an upgrade or retail standalone product - so why keep paying for capabilities it already has out-of-the-box?
The built-in defrag tools in Windows have been coded by Diskeeper since Windows 95 came out, or is using licensed code/technology from Diskeeper, and that includes the self-sufficient defrag routines in Vista and Windows 7 too...
So basically when you buy the retail version of Diskeeper, you get a few more bells and whistles, a pretty GUI that actually shows you stuff when it happens ("Ooo, see those colored blocks moving all over the place, that's how I know it's actually defragging my drive"), etc.
In the end, the exact same job gets done by using what the OS already does itself, it's just not as "shiny and pretty" as the full blown heavily bloated retail version of Diskeeper provides. When you buy it, you're buying the bloat and the packaging - the core routines are already in the OS and work as designed.
You already paid for the OS - either by buying a new machine with it pre-installed or buying it as an upgrade or retail standalone product - so why keep paying for capabilities it already has out-of-the-box?
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It says that some people are still prone to believing marketing hype, rather than doing their own research and considering information from non-biased sites. If I put a blurb up on my cooking website that states I'm a world reknowned chef, does that make it true? Would you believe it? One of the first things you learn in school when writing research papers is to know your source. If you believe marketing, you'd think every car won Car Of The Year every year.
Magnetoman
Weaksauce
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- Dec 8, 2008
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- 79
Random access of fragmented data will over time result in shorter strokes of the disk head. If the disk is defragmented longer strokes are needed to reposition the head after each file read/write. Defragmentation is great for sequential data and for single file access times but overall chaos on the drive leads to lower access times than order.
Intriguing..but IMHO it's not necessarily true..you assume that all the fragments are always placed near each other on the physical disk...and all the files to be read are also always placed in close physical proximity on the disk...a rather unlikely scenario.
Also (and I could be wrong here) AFAIK, to read a contiguous file, the FS has to access the MFT only once, but for a fragmented file, it has to access the MFT every time it reads a fragment; this itself will introduce an overhead in access time. Of course, whether this difference is perceptible in all situations is another matter.
When I was using Windows XP I had JKDefrag installed. I couldn't use the built in one because it always wanted something like 15% or 25% free hard disk space ( I had small C: drive ), which actually is a hell of a lot just so it's able to defragment. In Windows 7 this is no longer an issue so the built in is fine for me when I remember to use it. Probably 5 times a year.
I also prefer PerfectDisk to Diskeeper, its boot time optimization is better.