Best defragging utilities?

diskeeper 10

O&O defrag

I would have to second diskeeper 10. I have 8 and it works great, 10 has even more features.

Diskeeper 10 is really a good defragger.

I'll third DisKeeper, I have version 9 and I absolutely love it. It's a MUST HAVE for ANYONE who owns a computer...

Thank you, the slight curve adds to teh beauty. :wink:

What's wrong with windows defrag?? I had no idea it was worth getting third party defraggers!

PerfectDisk



I don't think windows defrag does system files like the pagefile and MFT table/zones. I don't think it consolidates free space either.

Raxco PerfectDisk 7.0

One caveat to Diskkeeper, it doesn't support hard drives over 500GB!!!!!! at least on the consumer version. Yeah I know that shouldn't be a big deal, but I had 2 300GB Diamondmaxs in RAID 0 and so I couldn't run it, I was less than pleased. So I switched over to O&O and it doesn't care what size HDD"s I have (or rather I haven't found its limit yet).

Just a FYI

Just tried the perfectdisk 7 last night and found that it can't defrag in boot mode with an nforce2. Just comes up and says something about a driver error. Other than that it seems to work well though.

I don't think it's the chipset since the requirements are:
Hardware

* Intel/Intel Compatible processor
* Supported on 32-bit and x64-based Windows
* 64 MB RAM (128MB recommended)
* 6 MB Disk Space
* All levels of RAID are supported

Probably a software conflict.

The question isn't what's wrong with windows defrag, but what ISN'T wrong. Windows defrag tool is horrendous.

with diskkeeper u cant fault

Windows defrag cannot defrag files over 3 or 4 GB's

Windows defrag provides nothing but monkey-motion displays showing "defrag" that is essentially meaningless to system performance because is leaves the MFT (master file table) totally untouched, thus system response time degrades continuously, which equals a hot CPU acting like a slug when running general applications. Haven't you ever noticed how snappy your system is immediately after reinstalling Windows, and how quickly (weeks) it turns into a response time slug? Diskeeper v10 (even cheapest Home version at $29.95) will cure the problems ... I use the Premier version for the facilities it provides.  

diskkeeper... used it for years. did not know about the 500gig limit mentioned above, but I have never had a drive (or array) that big. Beyond that it works flawlessly.

I agree diskkeeper works well. I used it on my 120GB and 2 35GB raptor for a couple of years then i hit that damn 500Gb barrier with 2 300GB stripped and was forced ot find O&O. Between the two I have found very little diffrence. They both have auto defrag, scheduling, boot time defrag. The only diffrence I have noticed is O&O allows you to defrag by Access, Size, Or Name, as opposed to Diskkeeper just allwoing a total defrag (but then agian I haven't used diskkeeper since ver 8 i wanna say)

Perfectdisk 7 all the way. I've used Diskeeper as well and IMO it doesnt' compare at all. Once you've tried Perfectdisk you'll see the difference. I do a weekly defrag and my rig runs like the first day I installed xp.

I don't believe it. I think Windows defrag does jut as good a job. Is free and isn't yet another program installed clogging up the OS.

I'd like to be proven somehow that a 3rd party defrag is so much better. This must be an elementary technology by now.

Better yet is to use a GHOST type program to take a snapshot of your recently installed OS and core applications. Then whenever your system starts gettign sluggish just re-ghost it back to pristine condition. Only takes my 5 minutes to run the re-ghost. Beautiful thing.

One caveat to Diskkeeper, it doesn't support hard drives over 500GB!!!!!! at least on the consumer version. Yeah I know that shouldn't be a big deal, but I had 2 300GB Diamondmaxs in RAID 0 and so I couldn't run it, I was less than pleased. So I switched over to O&O and it doesn't care what size HDD"s I have (or rather I haven't found its limit yet).

Just a FYI

well... let me get this straight...
i was going to use diskeeper 10...
and i have 1TB of RAID HDD...
which means... physical space is 1TB...
u mean it won't support 500GB of physical HDD?
or 500GB of Logical HDD?

well true that ghosting is good and easy...
but he's just talking about defraggin util...
...
as for the windows defrag..
it SUX... i can't defrag large files..
i.e. for my large files... it can't defrag for shiat... all those big files, it cannot defrag!! damn that red color w/ cannot defrag... that's BS!
at least 3rd party DOES defrag 3 or 4gb of single file; never in windows...

Logical. If I break my RAID 0 array of 2x300Gb and just have it as RAID 1 or 2 plain manilla hard drives it will defrag them fine. The catch is that Executive Software (makes Diskkeeper) thinks that if you have over 500GB you are a business, or server, or what not. So they make you buy a much beefier edition. Its just a arbitrarily imposed single logical drive size limit to keep businesses from buying the simple consumer level product and saving a boat load of money.

So when they come out with a 600GB harddrive Diskkeeper would not defrag it, same as the 2x300GB RAID 0. So either go O&O if you wanto keep your GIGANTIC 1Tb array (hehe), or keep the array size under 500GB. Like I have said before this limitation was in v8, and MAY have been upped since then, but I don't think so. Feel free to call me on it.

u are re ta did

I see. I guess I don't have any 3+GIG files that I can think of!!! XP doesn't address that? I'm still on 2000 (seems leaner and meaner to me). Surly Vista defrag will be improved.

I wouldn't be surprised if a future Windows finds a smart way to bypass the need for defraging entirely. Some sort of way to keep fragments together or move things around on the fly to make room. Seems like a better way could be figured out. Maybe incremental defrag on shutdown. Then again, I'm talking out of my ass.

I AM NOT RETARDED. I'm sure to know more than you....

How bout some facts and evidence that you're better off with a 3rd party defrag? Or do you just buy into the marketing hype and buy programs you know nothing about? Show my your evidence! I'm not saying it's not true I'm just saying I have seen no proof!

I think what is stopping your belief is just that most here are saying "it suxxorz" or something like that... google it up, look for sites (like tom's) that can help you with the understanding of why the win defrag is not good enough. I am with you that just hearing that "it sucks" is not good enough.

My own limited understanding is pretty much what some of the above are saying... the "free" defrag w/ windows cannot touch the page file and many windows file-subsystems. This and I do believe that it does not actually "defrag" in the sense that it should actually re-organizes free space to be contiguous but doesn't. Most 3rd party apps do this, and run MUCH faster than the windows one. (That I know for sure!)

It is also not "another" program clogging things up. Windows defrag will not do intelligent defrags on a schedule. (note: "intelligent") and it wont defrag in the background like diskkeeper and others do. If anything is open durring windows defrag is essentially re-starts the process!

Those are just some reasons why it really does suck! google for the rest.

I'm surprised linux_0 hasn't popped in here yet since Linux doesn't need you to defrag your drives.

Oh yah...Diskeeper works well. I too didn't know about the 500GB limit though.

lol

You know me too well :-D ;-)

Here goes....

Unix, *BSD and Linux do not require a defrag utility because their filesystems almost never get fragmented :-D :mrgreen:

And there you have it!!!

There is a defrag utility but you can only use it in ext2 and it doesn't do much anyway... which is why I said this to begin with:



Great reading... enjoy :-D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

Linux is a great idea it is just a pain to deal with command line crap. I fiddled around with it once or twice, and never really got behind the idea of using a command line interface to install crap. Ok, realisticly I may have been using the wrong "version" but what ev lol. Feel free to correct me, but I don't want to hijack the thread.

@500Gb limit... see I know really weird and random sh!t lol

According to Diskeeper's website, the limit is 768 GB.

You're right.

If you read a few posts back, I said that the 500GB limit was as of version 8 and that they may have upped it. It is nice to see they have, but that 768GB limit still precludes the poster with a 1TB array using the home edition.

Nice find  

OK

Time to rap this thread up!!

1) Diskeeper 8/9/10 won't cut it because it won't defrag drives that have less than 20% free space (do correct me if I got that figure wrong :-). It is also slower than Perfect Disk (6.0 or 7.0) and burns up way too much CPU while defragging. I have tried Diskeeper (8,9,10) and I was not impressed...

2) Windows file defragger is way too slow. Try running it on a 500Gbyte drive that is nearly full - IT WILL __NEVER__ FINISH!! As has already been stated it also won't touch page files or importantly the MFT (master file allocation table which indexs all the files on an NTFS partition and so it is REALLY IMPORTANT TO KEEP THIS SYSTEM FILE CONTINGOUS). Never mind the fact that the final file placement is way sub-optimal anyway...

Offtopic rant about Linux starting!!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3) As has been stated Linux/BSD is far superior. I plan on moving my all my bulk storage from an external box with eSATA connections to a Gbit ethernet NAS box running BSD (there is a nice BSD distro for setting up an NAS that can even boot from 128Mbyte USB stick :-). Anything to get away from the lame-ass NTFS file system which chokes up so damn quickly. I have a weekly Perfect Disk defrag schedule and I really need it!!

The harddisk mangement in the 2.6 kernel is way smarter than Windows XP (performs reordering of accesses similar to NCQ in SATA-II drives). Just watch a dual stream access to an older ATA drive grind to a halt under Windows (unless you have lots of RAM)!!

As for comments about Linux being for command line geeks that is frankly bollix... Sure it is for geeks but its now for GUI geeks as well!! Any of the main modern distros (except maybe Slack) are a piece of piss to setup and have a nice windows GUI interface. Mandriva even have a nice GUI based app. to repartition an existing Windows NTFS/FAT32 partition to make room for EXT3,etc. Linux partition on a HD. This works really well in my experience.

I would use Linux, BSD as the main OS on my PCs but for the lack of some software I need and games of course is a draw back!! But I always set up my PCs for dual-boot. I also run a box running IP-Cop (a Linux distro) as an internet router (with a PCI DSL modem) with a Firewall and Quality of Service packet re-ordering and rate-limiting (this is built into the Linux kernel). I couldn't share an internet connection (with 2 of my flatmates) without the QOS feature in Linux due to all my P-2-P usage :-) !!

Sorry for my off topic rant about Linux but if you haven't tried at least 2 of the recent Linux releases - Knoppix is sweet as it will run straight off a CD or DVD (larger edition) without HD installation at all - then you probably aren't in a position to make comments about how hard it is to use!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4) File fragmentation is serious problem when a drive partition is really full (like >80%) - hence the problem I have with Diskeeper!! The drive head is having to move all over the surface of the platters in a harddisk to access the discontiguous sectors. This leads to big jump in latency (seektimes for most 7,200rpm drives are in the milli-second range which is much longer than the latency of modern DDR-RAM). This is not a big deal if you are just writing letters or browsing the internet. But most people don't want jerky DVD/.avi playback, etc.!! So when I disk nearly full that is the point when you should see a big improvement in file access times and transfer rates after a PerfectDisk defrag run.

Just my $0.02!!

Bob Wya

For windows defragmenter...

If you have 2 partitions Set your C: drive to "No Paging File" and set another drive to System Managed, or whatever size. It's only temporary. If only one partitions, set to "No Paging File"...should be fine since we're booting to safe mode only.

Boot into Safe Mode.
Delete C agefile.sys if it's still there.
Run defrag on the C: drive. Run multiple times if necessary.
Change virtual memory settings back (pagefile on C: again).
Reboot.
Defrag other partition if applicable.

Windows Defrag does a decent job if you help it along. The third party apps do most of this for you. They also don't usually have to be run multiple times either. I've tried the third party stuff before, and I couldn't tell any difference as far as perfomance gain goes. If you don't mind fussing around with your VM settings occasionally, windows defrag seems to work fine. If you want to max benchmark scores (which is the only way I could tell the difference), then go with a 3rd party app.

I think it depends on what you classify as "free"...

The command line is optional. Most modern distros can do pretty much everything from the GUI.

Granted the CLI can accomplish stuff better, faster cheaper.

The command line is optional. Most modern distros can do pretty much everything from the GUI.

Granted the CLI can accomplish stuff better, faster cheaper.

Holy rm -rf * Batman I must be a command line commando geek.

lol

"lets put on eye patches!... lets cut off our legs and glue on wooded ones!..."

The command line is optional. Most modern distros can do pretty much everything from the GUI.

Granted the CLI can accomplish stuff better, faster cheaper.

Holy rm -rf * Batman I must be a command line commando geek.


lol

Have fun with this one :-D

@P=split//,".URRUUc8R";@d=split//,"nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/S/;print

No I didn't write it, I borrowed it...

I'll post the URL later.

I've noticed that windows defrag screws up performance more than helps when it comes to NTFS partitions.. like MFT not getting defragged causing a decrease in performance. For FAT32, it doesn't need a MFT therefore you may notice slight increases in performance or not at all.

However after the first defrag with diskeeper 10, my system was immediately snappy... the time it takes to defrag feels shorter too, since it has like "smart defrag" capabilities where it efficiently defrags what is necessary and whats not. Some features is that it allows scheduled defrags where you can set the priority and it can auto-defrag in the background without compromising a lot of disk-performance while you were doing something, lets say if you were gaming; MFT/Page File defragmentation; resize of the MFT to accommdate more files without the risk of MFT fragmentation which would lead to a decrease in performance for NTFS filesystems.

The older diskeeper versions are still excellent defragging utilities, I just happened to have 10 to land in my lap  

The command line is optional. Most modern distros can do pretty much everything from the GUI.

Granted the CLI can accomplish stuff better, faster cheaper.

Holy rm -rf * Batman I must be a command line commando geek.


lol

Have fun with this one :-D

@P=split//,".URRUUc8R";@d=split//,"nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/S/;print

No I didn't write it, I borrowed it...

I'll post the URL later.

That one there looks like some windows jibberish to me...

Has nothing to do with windoze.

It's an open source language.

I don't know how it compares to other degragging applications, but I do know what it can do. Diskeeper works "most effectively" with at least 20% free space, but it can defragment with lower. I've tried with 2% free and it didn't go too well obviously, but it still tried and managed to move a few things.

I think maybe you are thinking of FragShield operations, which do need at least 20% free. This includes MFT and Page File defragging.

*puts on pirate eye patch*
It's so easy it's not even funny!


8O

Older versions of Diskeeper CAN do over 500Gb...you just need the enterprise edition. I have 4x250Gb in a Raid-5, resulting in a 750Gb partition. I had to upgrade from the residential version to get it to work. It does slow the computer down to a crawl, but I only let it run at night...

were can i get a good defrag util for free......



MSI K7DELTA2 Platinum
sempron 3000 barton
OCZ 512 Gold R3 x2
Leadtek 6600GT
WD80 sata
Thermaltake 480PSU

sorry this might not be the answer you are looking for...

but the best defrag is always:

Complete Backup, Format, Complete Restore.

It takes time to do and if not done properly with professional tools u might just destroy all your data but the fragmentation is 0% after doing it this way