Suggestions for a good defragging program

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vitalym

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2008
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I have PerfectDisk, but I feel there are better ones out there, any suggestions?
 
What exactly are you looking to do that isn't possible with the defragger built into Windows?
 
vitalym said:
Well the Windows XP one wasn't good, unless the Windows 7 one is better...
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It is better. Win7 isn't WinXP. About 99% of users would do best to just let Win7 do its thing with the hard drive, because Microsoft has figured out the right way to do it.
 
The Windows 7 defragger is automagic and defrags as required - zero intervention on the part of the user is necessary as long as things are just left alone so Windows 7 can take care of itself.

Having said that, for the times when I know I'm doing a lot of "stuff" on my system drive and I just get that hankerin' to do a manual defrag, the one I've decided to stick with recently is the Auslogics Disk Defrag, in a portable version (the Portable version download is near the bottom of the page, do NOT use the top CNET link, that's the full regular version that requires installation - look for the "FREE Download Disk Defrag Portable for home use" link). It's very fast (faster than most everything else I've tried), it gets the job done very well, and I've checked it's final defrag results against that of others and it's my manual defragger of choice nowadays.

Almost all the other just keep throwing out claims of this, that, etc, and most all of them are utter bullshit - the Auslogics one is simple, clean, deadly efficient, and that's all that matters without making ridiculous claims in the process.

It's also about 1.5MB in size (the portable .exe version) which makes all the "competition" look pretty damned bloated save for the defrag.exe command line version in Windows. :)
 
Bahamut reminds me of BBZ_Ghost of [H] Forum past. He ain't no "Average_Joe", or is he?
 
Prior to Windows 7, I had always seen lots of love for JKDefrag and Defraggler.

As for Auslogics, I remember reading claims that it's not as thorough, hence the quick completion. Some said it didn't really "do anything," but I won't refute what Bahamut said since I've only used it once or twice. Thanks for the link to the portable version; I just downloaded it and will try to do some testing when I have time.

I have read that the defragger built into Windows 7 is improved and nothing more is needed, but still I'd like to see it compared to some of the 3rd party defraggers before simply assuming that they can't/don't do a better job. Maybe it's just because I lived with XP for so long, but it's hard for me to believe that a dedicated defragging app like JKDefrag that is purpose-built for the job with multiple optimization routines doesn't do a better job than the one Microsoft included. I mean yeah, the built-in ISO burning utility does its job too but it's rather limited compared to ImgBurn.
 
Well, I guess it comes down to one question: what the hell do you people want a defragger to actually do? :)

It defragments the data on the drive, and based on some tuning coding in most of them it can even take a peek at the last time accessed information and potentially restructure how that data is laid out on the drives so the most frequently accessed data (by timestamps) is placed towards the outer edges where speed is greatest.

I really don't know what people expect from defraggers anymore, they all eventually end up with a drive/partition in a state where there's no fragmentation on a file-level basis, so in that respect they all get the job done the same. A few features here, a few features there, a much more bloated application, a lot more marketing bullshit (aka "SuperStealth" or whatever buzzwords sound really nice, maybe "I-FAAST" or the already mentioned "SmartPlacement"etc) - is it really worth all the fuss?

I'm tougher on my machine than probably 99% of the Windows users out there, and on a daily basis I'll be moving anywhere from 5 to 25GB of data on and off my system partition and that's only 48GB in size, with Windows 7 Pro x64 on it (1GB static page file, no hibernation file, and about 15GB used for apps/OS).

I know for a fact that the amount of activity I put this system partition through would make XP go insane in terms of fragmentation but, with Windows 7, I've yet to see it go over 4%, ever, and that's just by using the built-in automagic defragger the OS comes with.

I use the Auslogics one just so I can see where some stuff is laid out, basically. But it doesn't matter which one I actually use, the drive ends up in the same state: defragmented, and verified with the command line defrag tool as I see fit.

A machine is only going to get so fast, really. It's about that fast when you first install the OS and, barring anything major happening, it's not going to get "faster" in terms of disk activity, etc. It can get faster - with Windows 7 and Vista - because of Superfetch and actually putting RAM to use instead of it just sitting there as XP and older versions of Windows did.

But in terms of disk access and reading/writing data on the hard drives (assuming we're not bringing SSDs into this at all), your machine isn't going to get any faster than it is immediately after a clean installation of Windows with respect to the hard drive and how Windows is going to use it.

I wish it was different but, that's just how it goes...
 
I prefer mydefrag.

I dont know if any other defrag programs let you see the physical location of files on the spindle, and i like this feature.
 
Bahamut said:
A machine is only going to get so fast, really. It's about that fast when you first install the OS and, barring anything major happening, it's not going to get "faster" in terms of disk activity, etc. It can get faster - with Windows 7 and Vista - because of Superfetch and actually putting RAM to use instead of it just sitting there as XP and older versions of Windows did.

But in terms of disk access and reading/writing data on the hard drives (assuming we're not bringing SSDs into this at all), your machine isn't going to get any faster than it is immediately after a clean installation of Windows with respect to the hard drive and how Windows is going to use it.
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Right, but no one's really concerned with running a defrag app to make the machine faster than it was after a clean install. The desire is to keep the file system as optimized, or the machine's performance as close to that fresh install state as possible.

I did a lot of reading on different sites about the various defraggers and people comparing them. What I gathered was that though they are all designed to do roughly the same thing, some are simply better at it than others. In the end I guess it doesn't affect me much anymore since I run Windows 7 on an SSD, so I'm pretty content to let the built-in defrag tool run when it needs to in order to keep my storage drives in shape.

You mentioned buzzwords, and it's funny how companies made such a market out of touting their defrag tool as the best, and giving these massive speed gains. I guess some do under certain circumstances, such as if a file server is heavily fragmented and users are simultaneously trying to transfer files that are fragmented all over the disks. But after seeing so much praise for apps like JKDefrag, I have to laugh at the fact that a lot of these people actually paid $40 or whatever for home versions of Diskeeper or PerfectDisk. But, whatever floats your boat.

Since I don't feel like spending a few hours reading more threads comparing dozens of different apps, I guess I'll just say that I do think certain ones do a better job than others and that I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did a better job than the one bundled with Windows. The question is, will you notice that difference in day to day use? I would suspect many wouldn't, but boy some people sure claim to. I guess there are just some people who are obsessed with obtaining a near-perfect organization of those 1s and 0s on their hard drive. :)
 
My opinion is that use should use one defragger and stick with it. Let Windows do its thing. When you want to run a manual defrag, use Windows defrag.
 
I've used Auslogics and O&O, with O&O being the better one, but Auslogics is free and good enough. I didn't like MyDefrag for the interface.
 
bigdogchris said:
It wasn't? I don't think you know what you're talking about. It did exactly what it's supposed to do.
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I've never seen a positive review about it, but since you're so smart, and clearly know what you're talking about, go find me some data and change my mind.
 
bigdogchris said:
It wasn't? I don't think you know what you're talking about. It did exactly what it's supposed to do.
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and it did it very slowly and inefficiently. the bundled defragger in xp was not very good. if you had a large file system with millions of files, it would take many times longer to defrag with the built in program than it would if you purchased some better solutions. sometimes days longer. there was a good PDF comparing the defrag times i read not too long ago. i think its still on one of my computers il see if i can dig it up.
 
Yeah the built-in one is notorious for being slow but for all I know it does do a good job. I believe there were some tests done on the 2000 & XP defraggers that showed other defrag tools doing a better job optimizing the file placement, but that's not as relevant anymore. I do NOT like how the one in Vista didn't give you a visual map or even a progress indicator...when running the one in Windows Vista it simply says "this may take several minutes or several hours." :rolleyes:

A lot of the contempt towards the built-in defrag tool probably originates from the Windows 95/98/ME days, when any minor amount of user activity while it was running would throw a prompt that the drive's contents had changed and it had to restart the process. But I don't have any proof that the defrag routines in Vista/7 don't do a better optimization than 3rd party defraggers and I'm not really interested in spending a lot of time and effort on the subject since my main drive is an SSD.
 
So today I had to reconfigure a Xerox MFD at work with a new name & IP address and logged on to a user's (XP) machine to do so. I noticed that the system was slow to log on/off, with lots of hard drive thrashing. I thought this would be a good chance to try the Auslogics portable that Bahamut recommended.

Color me impressed. I ran a regular defrag which definitely seemed to help, and then restarted and did a defrag + optimize which Auslogics recommends running once a week. The PC is generally a lot more responsive with less thrashing and faster load times. I can definitely say that the Auslogics software did something good, though I didn't have time to create an image and do a thorough comparison with JKDefrag, Defraggler, or the built-in defrag. I'll be keeping Auslogics defrag portable in my toolkit for future use.
 
at my work there are pc's that are heavily fragmented, I have tried mydefrag on them but it just doesnt seem to work on heavily fragmented systems (it will place random fragmented files all over the place, while defragmenting others). The microsoft tool usually ends up being better in my opinion instead of mydefrag.
 
vitalym said:
I've never seen a positive review about it, but since you're so smart, and clearly know what you're talking about, go find me some data and change my mind.
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jesus, people review this stuff?

I mean if you enjoy micro managing your software I guess I get this thread...

but guys, seriously, stop micro managing your computer. Let the OS do its job --PhD's have written their thesis statements on pretty well all aspects of the modern operating system. Next you guy's will be telling me you want to write your own schedulers...

Anyways, A) let windows 7 do its thing, its defragging efficiently and quietly. Yes it does use a different defragger from XP.

B) XP's defragger did the job and it did it about as well as bubblesort (slow but intuitive sorting algorithm) does its job. Continuing the analogy a bit all of the 3rd party defraggers as well as Windows 7's own defragger use the quicksort/mergesort (two mathematically-proven fastest possible sorting algorithms) defragger.
 
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