What is the BEST DEFRAGMENTING SOFTWARE

I know this is purely an opinion issue, but if you take a look at the history between ExecSoftware and O&O, you'll find that one company has always been side by side with Microsoft when developing their products and one has not. One is the over-whelming majority in the corporate world, and one is not allowed on domain machines in certain companies (such as mine) because of high levels of data corruption.
 
http://www.whitneyfamily.org/Hacks/?item=Defrag said:
My machine at work has a disk full of about 112,000 files and folders taking up about 15GB and it takes less than 8 hours to do a total disk defrag.
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Everything was looking pretty good until I read that. Can anyone tell me if it's actually that slow?? It would take an entire day to defrag my machine with all the game files on it.
 
djnes said:
I know this is purely an opinion issue, but if you take a look at the history between ExecSoftware and O&O, you'll find that one company has always been side by side with Microsoft when developing their products and one has not. One is the over-whelming majority in the corporate world, and one is not allowed on domain machines in certain companies (such as mine) because of high levels of data corruption.
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I take it that O&O is the one that corrupts data?
 
JL_Audio_User said:
Well the corruption must take more than 2 years since I have been using O&O 1 time a week for 2 years. :confused:
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So you being a sample of one is considered a legitimate test? Personal testimonials are great to have, but they need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially compared to industry tests and comparisions. I have yet to see a study, online or in print that placed O&O above Diskeeper. If you know of one, add it to the thread.

As far as personal testimonial, I've had nothing but problems when I tested it under 2000 and XP. Diskeeper is the rock that never fails me, so I'll keep using it.
 
djnes said:
So you being a sample of one is considered a legitimate test? Personal testimonials are great to have, but they need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially compared to industry tests and comparisions. I have yet to see a study, online or in print that placed O&O above Diskeeper. If you know of one, add it to the thread.

As far as personal testimonial, I've had nothing but problems when I tested it under 2000 and XP. Diskeeper is the rock that never fails me, so I'll keep using it.
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#1. I remember you and me having a BIG problem recently.....remember that? The mods told me to ignore you .....being that it was better than flaming. But it is difficult to ignore you when you quote me.....please dont.


#2 I highlighted that part of your quote because it is a good example of the term "It goes without saying" I was giving my personal opinion....I claimed nothing more.

I stated my personal opinion of you in a PM. I was very clear. Then you chose to alert the mods to my PM ( something I thought would be private ) I was warned, and advised to ignore you. That is difficult when you start quoting me because you disagree with a "personal" opinion I have. If you dont like my opinion...oh well.<<<<Thats what I do when I see a post of yours I dont like...I just move on.


and on topic:

again, I have used diskeeper and O&O and I preffer O&O. I have never had any problems with "Data corruption"

***adds djnes to ignore list*** thought he was already there :confused:
 
JL_Audio_User, let's get one thing straight. I had no problem with you, nor did I even know who you were until I opened my PM box one day and say a flaming PM with personal attacks that I've never read on here. You gave no reason or even an explanation. I reported it to the mods because it was totally and completely unjustified and unwarranted. If you had a problem with me for something I said or did, you could have PMed me about it to discuss it like an adult, not the way you handled it. Your damn lucky you were banned for the things that you said, and when I was approached about it, I had no answer for why it was sent to me, which made your attack even worse. I really am not bothered if you say you don't like me. Honestly, I'm not. I also disagree in opinion with people on here all the time...we all do...that's how the forum works. I and these other people just choose to discuss it like adults, rather than run off to send a nasty, filth laden PM because someone thinks differently that I or they do at the time. Some of the people I respect the most on here, I disagree with quite often.

Now, to the topic at hand. I was mearly pointing out that personal opinion hould be taken as that. To you, it goes without saying as it does to most. Unfortunately, on here, that isn't always understood. You stated your opinion, I stated mine. I also added larger test results from a corporate environment. We happen to disagree. Is that a problem, or a reason to get your knickers all in a bunch? No. You need to relax a bit and calm down. That's a comment a mod gave to me when they looked through a bunch of your posts. It's just an internet forum...people disagree. It happens. Go look in the Intel and AMD sections. Nothing but disputes. When I asked you for a link about O&O, I wasn't saying it to be nasty. I honestly was hoping you'd have a comparison to link to. We'd all benefit from reading it.

Now, whatever your problem is with me, I'd suggest just getting over it. I know I never attacked you directly, so I'm honestly at a loss for what it was. I apologize if I happened to disagree with you in a past thread or topic, but that's life. I disagree with a lot of people that I respect highly, so it's not a big deal. In the corporate IT world, especially in project management, disagreements often lead to progress. If you'd like to enlighten me on what your beef is with me, feel free to PM me. I honestly don't have an idea of what it might be.
 
why & another vote for

Ice Czar said:
O&O Defrag Pro
Invaluable tool for optimizing, wouldnt want to be without it
I have it intgrated into the MMC and from the commandline as well
running version 4

saturnine2 said:
It gives you more options, lets you defrag based on date, filename, etc.
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t. shuffle said:
I have never understood how either of those options would be valuable.
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Complete Name > Using this convention it is possible for you to create directories that will comntain Program Groups closer to the OD (Outer Diameter) of the HDD platter where both the sustained transfer rate and the latency are better, alternately, aps or data that doesnt require a high sustained transfer or that are infrequently accessed can be placed in a directory closer to the ID of the platter (or partition) basically it extends the partition strategy into a single partition, my Adobe and AutoCAD directories being in a much better position than Video Directory (media doesnt require much if its read only)

Complete Date or Access > are primarilly for Database server use, though if you give some thought to it....
say you mount an NTFS Volume as a folder (we'll make it a logical partition\drive in the backend of the HDD in an extended partition) this partition simply holds email files or docs, none of them very big, so even with the lower density in the ID of the disk, the files are also smaller and the latency thus offset, organizing these by date is likely adventageous since your more likely to need to access those than older "storage", thus those files will be closer to the front of the partition, so that when accessed the armeture and head will have less distance to traverse and their position farther out from the ID will have better density and thus lower latency

(caveat, by placing those small and frequently access files as a mounted drive located at the back of the HDD, the arm would need to traverse far outside its "normal" OS partition with considerable ncreased latency, your best access is within any given partition, one of the reasons indexing can have a negative impact on HDD performance, so downloading and writing email as you recieve it by leaving your client open as opposed to checking your email a few times a day can act very similar to indexing, would have little impact for gebneral use, but if your Photoshopin or working on some other disk intensive access, it can be a performance loss)

to understand disk access optimizing its important to understand disks first
Id highly recommend the As the Hard Disc Spins series @ Lost Circuits and Partitioning Strategies @ Radified
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personally I recommend you trial the big three and see what features you apprciate most
Diskeeper, O&O and PerfectDisk

live with em awhile then decide ;)


as far as data corruption, Ive borked data a dozen ways to Sunday
but not with O&O

& you all play nice now you here ;)
 
Do any of these products (intentionally) cause a reboot so that they can defrag the registry hives and the page/swap file? Or does one still need a seperate utility to defrag the in-use system files? (I use the free 'pagedefrag' off of sysinternals.com)
 
S1nF1xx said:
Everything was looking pretty good until I read that. Can anyone tell me if it's actually that slow?? It would take an entire day to defrag my machine with all the game files on it.
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That's cause his algorithm evacutates and places. It may move the file anywhere between 1 and n times, but it will be truly defragged when done.
 
I have Diskeeper running on my machine and don't notice any slowdowns because of it. The only thing I wish it would do better would be to alert me when there are updates to the software. My computer always runs nice and fast.
 
JL_Audio_User said:
***adds djnes to ignore list*** thought he was already there :confused:
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Breathe in, breathe out. :) I don't think djnes was making any nasty remarks nor flaming you at all. I tend to agree with what he said--one personal experience won't necessarily make up for a company-wide slew of bad experiences.

That said, we're all friends here, so it'll work out. :)

On topic: I'm glad to read through this thread; I'll be trying out Diskeeper shortly to see if I like it any better than the Windows-provided defrag program. Thanks for the links, all!
 
Ranma_Sao said:
That's cause his algorithm evacutates and places. It may move the file anywhere between 1 and n times, but it will be truly defragged when done.
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Is there going to be a substantial difference between running that defragmenter and Diskeeper? If there's a big enough boost to be gained I'd say the extra time would be worth it.
 
S1nF1xx said:
Is there going to be a substantial difference between running that defragmenter and Diskeeper? If there's a big enough boost to be gained I'd say the extra time would be worth it.
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yup

he grabbed the source code form sysinternals
another useful defrag from them is contig
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html
which is just for a single file at a time and runs from the commandline

Mark Russinovich at Sysinternal\Winternals\Windows.Net is the man when it comes to NTFS
see > Advanced HDD Issues >


NTFS Advanced Studies
NTFS Volume Management and HKLM\System\DiskKey
NTFS Boot INI Options Reference
NTFS Defragmenting
Inside W2K NTFS Part 1
Inside W2K NTFS Part 2
Exploring NTFS On-Disk Structures
Inside Storage Management, Part 1
Inside storage Management Part 2 Basic vs Dynamic Disks
Inside Encrypting File System Part 1
Inside Encrypting File System Part 2
Inside Memory Management Paging Files


Additional NT Articles at Windows & .NET Magazine By Mark Russinovich Including: Crash Dump Analysis, Inside Win32 Services, Windows 2000 Kernal, Scalability Enhancements, Management Interface, Reliability Enhancements, and the Registry.
Additional NTFS Articals and Utilities atSysinternals
 
Ice Czar has covered it well here, but there are several good threads around here on the subject. There is no comparison to O&O that I have seen, and I have used Executive's program, so my experience is not limited to just O&O, or the resident Windows program. No full featured defragmentation program defragments locked files as well, and no other program works as seamlessly. O&O has many options, and it can use advanced heuristics based on the user's habits to determine the need for defragmentation, not to mention its ability to transfer data to an online space to facilitate the defragmentation of large files, like the page file, for example. The space is automatically provided by O&O's maker. It also has the ability to defragment multiple partitions at once. The amount of system resources used can also be configured. It has the ability to automatically defragment in the background based on parameters that the user sets, or it can determine the need automatically, and implement the appropriate action to take. It is smart, very smart. O&O is quite simply one of the most brilliantly written programs ever made, regardless of purpose. It is a "must have" piece of software that only gets better with each release, and it never adds bloat, only features that you can actually use.

Get the program, and try it for free for thirty days. Then, you will agree. :)
 
Ice Czar said:
yup

he grabbed the source code form sysinternals
another useful defrag from them is contig
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html
which is just for a single file at a time and runs from the commandline
Click to expand...
I run PageDfrag v2.32 at the start up to keep the windows kernel running like new I have an 80 gig laptop w/ almost half of it used I run Power Defragmenter GUI 2.0.105 after booting up and it takes only about 5-10 minuets tops to defrag the entire drive on the power defragmentation mode.

And both are FREE.

Power Defragmenter GUI 2.0.105 AKA Contig

Power Defragmenter is based on Sysinternals defragmentation "engine".
Basically its just a very advanced GUI for the Sysinternals core application which takes defragmentation process to a whole new level.
Very high defragmentation speed, efficiency and ease of use.
Such high speed is only available with Sysinternals defragmentation "engine".

PageDefrag v2.32

One of the limitations of the Windows NT defragmentation interface is that it is not possible to defragment files that are open for exclusive access. Thus, standard defragmentation programs can neither show you how fragmented your paging files or Registry hives are, nor defragment them. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system.

PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000 hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).
 
I have a question, what's wrong with the included Windows defragger? I only use that one and it seems to work fine, but here it seems that nobody else uses it? :confused:
 
There's nothing wrong with the built-in defragger. The other 3rd party defragging programs simply offer more features that aren't avaiable in the Windows Defragger.
 
NickN said:
I have a question, what's wrong with the included Windows defragger? I only use that one and it seems to work fine, but here it seems that nobody else uses it? :confused:
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Nothing's wrong with it at all. I've always found it does a good job, it just takes longer than Diskeeper Pro. However, you can basically consider the the built in defragger as Diskeeper Lite. As mentioned above, ExecSoftware wrote the code for it since 2000 I believe.
 
Complete Name > Using this convention it is possible for you to create directories that will comntain Program Groups closer to the OD (Outer Diameter) of the HDD platter where both the sustained transfer rate and the latency are better
Click to expand...

I prefer O&O too, but moving files to the outer of the drive will do nothing for real-world performance. The same goes for the pagefile (where this is often mentioned). This is because all putting a file on the outer cylinders will do it optimize for sustained transfer rate. Under Windows in real life this would not matter as the head is moving all over the place. What is important is organizing frequently-accessed files so that they are near each other. This optimises seek times which is everything in HD performance.

Even O&O's help file is just completely wrong.

Files are sorted alphabetically from the beginning to the end of the partition. This leads to quick access to files in a directory. When Windows starts up, many system files will be read in sequence from the \WINDOWS and the \WINDOWS\system32 directories (DLLs, system drives, etc.) and the start-up time will therefore be shorter.
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Windows in no way reads many system files in sequence ever. The heads are hopping all over the disk anyway paging a little here and there. This is also why defragmenting means as little as it does in XP Too many people take fragmentation way too seriously. The only time it may be neccessary to defrag is if the files you frequently acess are very heavily fragmented. For files you don't use it doesn't even matter.

So it takes very high levels of fragmentation to really have an effect on real-world performance. If files under Windows were really read from one end to another without dsoing anything else in the meantime then yes a fragmented file will degrade performance. However for most files and most systems this is not how files are read. Ussually you will access a small part of one file and then a small part of many others before you go back to the first one. So the head is hopping all over the place regardless if the file is fragmented or not. If the file is very heavily fragmented though it may make a difference since thedisk IO buffer size under Windows is only 64 KB. However this would be extremely rare.
 
KoolDrew said:
I prefer O&O too, but moving files to the outer of the drive will do nothing for real-world performance. The same goes for the pagefile (where this is often mentioned). This is because all putting a file on the outer cylinders will do it optimize for sustained transfer rate. Under Windows in real life this would not matter as the head is moving all over the place. What is important is organizing frequently-accessed files so that they are near each other. This optimises seek times which is everything in HD performance.
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1. assuming your not employing multiple drives
(prime example a dedicated scatchdisk partition for photoshop, or employing multiple pagfiles)

2. its not just sustained transfer that is increased but also latency that is decreased

As the Hard Disc Spins:
Averages, Seeks and other Paradoxes

the density is greater at the OD any seek and miss means the rotational latency will be better on average, that and by having a dedicated and smaller partition your limiting the arm travel provided the rest of the drive is rarely accessed storage.

Partitioning and Optimizing Tutorial


more than one HDD is very common in here ;)
 
Huh, well I DL'd & installed a trial version of O&O Pro 8.0, & ran a "Complete/Access" defrag (just made sense to me to run that one). Anyways, right after doing that, I re-booted, & after POST, CHKDSK automatically ran (I did NOT schedule it), presumably b/c all my files were moved about the HD. I immediately started experiencing a start-up hang on every re-boot--after entering my logon password (I use XP Pro, SP2), my desktop would appear, & my start-up programs would start to load, but would never complete--it just hung. I always had to do a hard re-boot.

No huge deal as I simply restored a backup image using Acronis. I'm guessing I should not have run "Complete/Access", at least on the first defrag attempt. Anyway, after restoring my OS/programs partition, I gave O&O another try & it seems to be working pretty well. I now use "Complete/Name" defrag. I'll utilize the full trial period, but so far, if my dumb a$$ can use this correctly, it appears to be as advertised. Thanks for the heads-up.
 
I always liked the defrag by modified, that way files that are never changed wont need to be defragemented again.
 
Ok. I started the thread. It sounds like I should go with O&O. Will I see a major difference between teh Microsoft one and O&O?

Is there a problem when I evaluate 3 different DEFRAG software packages?
 
Well, it's back to Diskeeper Pro 9.0 for me. I had to restore my backyp image again after running O&O defrag--got the same start-up hangs as before. The only commonality is running one of the "Complete/**" defrags w/ O&O. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think so.......To bad, I like all the options of O&O & it's gui.
 
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