For a really thorough set of reviews on defrag programs, you need go no further than Donn Edward's labour of love:

[donnedwards.openaccess.co.za]

iandol

I have downloaded this program but when I try to start it up it does nothing. I know it is trying to start because it uses almost all my CPU, but I have even let it sit overnight and nothing happens... Has this happened to anybody else, and can you help?

mikefreak13

I've used PerfectDisk for a couple of years and it's neato. I didn't buy it (was a 21st Birthday gift from dad). it doesn't use a lot of resources (of course) and I set it up for 3:30am stuff...

TheManator

Incidentally, OSX already does this.

Panther's Adaptive Hot File Clustering (Running Mac OS X Panther, Chapter 10, page 152):
Over a period of time, the system keeps track of small files that are read frequently, but never written to. As the system learns which files are used most and which are least likely to change size, it moves them to the fastest part of the drive, where they can quickly be accessed. Files that don't meet the requirements for being in this "hot zone" are moved out to ensure that enough room exists for the files that should be there.

And it defrags files on open.

bronskrat

shite... I meant here:

[www.maximumpc.com]

... but *sigh* although it seems there is some confusion... I can't find the defrag article in the April issue... on the site, while it says it is the April 2008 issue, the picture of the cover of the magazine associated with the defrag article says June... you may have to wait a couple of months for the proper pdf

keh

Umm, but, that said... if you want to read the article, you can download it free, legally, from them in PDF format here:

[www.maximumpc.com]

keh

/offtopic
I stopped reading Maximum PC when it stopped being Boot... Ahhh Boot... now that was a magazine for enthusiasts. MaxPC is glossy ads.

keh

@That_Eagle_Scout!: Thats exactly what I was thinking.

Alicemagic

Does anyone know if the PAGESYS defrag works on Vista - even Technet Sysinternals can't do that.

I know Norton allowed PAGESYS defrag on XP, as well as PageDefrag from Sysinternals. I use AUSlogics (free, fast, pretty pictures), the MS defrag and previously used Diskeeper.

Only put UltimateDefrag on Virtual machines - but i guess i'll try on my main system. Time for a clean install anyway.

bcarpent1228

@pcx339: Where can I find a step-by-step/plain-English guide about how to set up a half-striped array? Google turns up a small number of technical references, and I need a clearer understanding to gauge whether it's for me or not. Thx

longbourne

There's no actual evidence that this, or any other, defrag regime has any effect on performance in normal use. Seriously, save your money, kids.

BotOfLaws

@alienhead: For those of us who don't want to buy that issue just for an article, how about a 250 word summary? KThanks.

nobodyzhome

@aj_robins:I have almost the same system setup (but with larger drive space) and it hasnt ever run that slow for me, you must have some other issues going on as well...although I am on SP2, not SP3. Although recency settings work well you may want to try just the auto like you said or fragmented files only to begin with.

Been using UltimateDefrag for almost a year now and its wonderful, highly recommended over everything else out there.

Empyrean

Tried on XP Pro SP3 and discarded. Locked up during simple defrag - without fancy performance optimization features - requiring system reboot. Application also crashed simply trying to view some info from disk analysis. Too bad; it has interesting ideas about improving performance.

BernardElymus

oops... April Maximum PC issue

alienhead

I suggest that everyone read the Maximum PC article on on defraggers and windows vista. I think everyone will be surprised.

alienhead

@WiglyWorm: thanks that is wap I was shooting for I wanna if I can get TF2 loaded up faster!

That_Eagle_Scout!

Just grabbed it ... and it appears to run pretty slowly. On my Intel E6600 (2.4GHz) w/WinXP SP3 & 3.5GB RAM, UltimateDefrag is reporting an estimated time of completion of over 42 hours (drive C: 390GB total, 222GB used). This is for a recency defrag (100% max resource usage, last accessed, most recent data most outer, respect high performance, and put directories close to MFT). I'm not impressed ATM, but I'll wait and see if there's any noticeable performance difference when it finishes. Perhaps, I should have tried the "auto" setting first.

(Ooh, the estimated time is now up to around 44 hours ...)

[ On a different note: my laptop came with a copy of diskeeper lite -- and it occasionally goes into some heavy-duty analysis mode while I'm using the laptop. It doesn't happen too often, but it's mighty annoying when it does. I'm not impressed with DK because of this (and the fact that it doesn't seem to be any better than XP's built-in defrag). ]

aj_robins

@Asatruer: I used to always set a fixed sized page file in windows, but with XP I seem to take a performance hit when I don't let Windows manage the size. What's up with that?

Anyway, PageDefrag helps a lot by defragging the page file and registry hives as needed each time I boot.

Johnay

@harmx: Assuming this app lets you pick specific files to send to the outer ring just select PAGEFILE.SYS and set your pagefile to a static size by setting the initial and max size to the same size.
[www.petri.co.il] has a pretty thorough article on pagefile optimization.

Asatruer

I find Perfectdisk... perfect. Although, if this does the same thing for free, then I may consider switching.

Saying that, running an XP machine and a Vista machine side by side, the XP machine gains more from "most-used order" defragging. It really speeds up the XP machine. There doesn't seem to be much difference in Vista, probably because of the preloading thing. Also, half of the disk in Vista is "undefraggable" for some reason (large black blocks showing up in PD in random positions).

Al Iguana

Another vote for JKDefrag but with Scandefragdriving it. Running a defragger on an 'active' system is mostly pointless. The files that you use normally are going to be locked because: you are using them. Scandefrag fixes this by scheduling everything to occur after a boot. You can set it up to scheduled chkdsk for the next reboot, and have it insert itself into the startup sequence on login to allow it to run before any other programs get in the way and lock up your files. It handles MS Defrag, JKDefrag, and Norton's Speed disk. In addition to scheduling a chkdsk, you can also have it run pagedefrag (from the former SysInternals group) and/or MS's diskclean up prior to main defrag.

SilasTalos

I know a lot of people don't like Norton products for several reasons but their System Works software has a very similar function called Speed Disk that will do the same thing. It's not free, but if you happen to have it installed already you can save yourself from having to install a new program.

GeForceATi

wow, this one is getting really techy w/ all the jargon. how about can someone actually post the times before and after the defrag? If several people post results, it might actually help. I for one, am using IObit smartdefrag right now.

qrius

This thread brings back so many war stories about disk storage...Back in the stone age when disc platters were 3+feet in diameter & the heads moved up to 18" per seek, I used to write the I/O subroutines that the app guys used to access HDD. In those days the application program had to move the heads, wait for the start of a track & do the read/write operations, so the systems programmers wrote those pieces of code as subroutines for the apps to call. The vendor on-site hardware repair guys used to tear their hair out when I'd fire up a 3 line program that would seek from track 0 to track 200 then loop. The disk drive would literally dance across the floor.

And now we have solid state disk, I am old...

BlogsOfSteel

I am a Diskeeper user,and prefer DK 2k8 to the other defrag apps out there. It's the only one that has worked completely flawlessly for me whether it was on my Vista notebook or the XP desktop. The new UD looks interesting on paper, but I don't plan to switch to another defrag app when the one I have is reliable and works so well...besides, I am also a bit lazy to try out another new program just out of curiosity lol ;)

PS: I have only the DK 2008 Pro versions, but I believe the ProPremier features some sort of file access acceleration algorithm too.

Neel_Relaxation

As head of IT where I work I am constantly looking for ways to keep all the older pcs up and running. I used this on my computer first and restarted. WOW! I can see the performance increase already! This will be installed and ran on all the computers here. Thanks for the great work you all do!

appsbyaaron

I'm starting to cut back on the amount of software I'm loading onto my poor computer. Installing a program that does something Windows does natively (Vista defrags while I sleep) I would consider clutter. Do defrag programs really differ all that much? Besides the natural placebo effect ("I installed it, so program must be loading faster!"), are we talking a difference in loading time of milliseconds or seconds?

OX4

I've been using Ultimate Defrag for about 9 months now on XP pro. Never had any problems with it. Programs definitely load faster. I'm a software ho thanks to lifehacker ;-) So I'm always installing and uninstalling things. Therefore I have to defrag fairly regularly.

hairlessape

I've been using JK-Defrag for nearly a year and I've been happy with it. I'll give this app a look though, because it sounds like it may give finer control.

Moving files to the front of the disk is an old trick but it's only been relatively recently that NTFS defragmenters (at least the free ones) have had this ability. Back in the Windows 95/98 days, I used to use the 9x version of Norton Speed Disk to move critical files to the front of the disk and the rarely used files to the back. The difference in performance usually amazed people. I published a book in 1999 about optimizing Windows 9x for performance and dedicated an entire chapter to defragmenting.

It seemed to make a bigger difference ten years ago than today (hard drives are a lot smarter now) but it still helps.

I only recommend using a defragmenter to rearrange your apps a couple of times a year at most though. It's time consuming and it does make the drive work pretty hard. When I was doing desktop support, I would only do this kind of thing once a year and I had a coworker who did it once a week and even experimented with doing it at bootup (ouch). His users went through a lot more hard drives than my users did. I sure wish I'd kept statistics because it probably would have been interesting.

At any rate, I can verify the trick works. I've been doing it for about 12 years to prolong the useful life of aging computers, including my own.

Dave-Farquhar

JkDefrag! Thumbs up. Easy to use, click, launch and forget about it. Also has a command-line version.

It uses the Windows API so its completely safe. Been using it for about 3 years now. Never failed me.

skylive

Why actively defragment your PC and spend hours waiting for it to complete? I added a task into XPs task scheduler which activates after 20 minutes of inactivity and defragments my disk using JkDefrag's default options. When I'm back from lunch, everything is done.

I formerly used mst Defrag which sits in the background and defragments every file seconds after it has been written to the disk. But with large files (iso images) it is a real performance hog.

(Anyone else noticed that IOBit's "Why Choose It" doesn't list *ANY* real reason why to choose their product? It only says something like "Choose us, because we're cool"...)

mbirth

JKDefrag works great and has several modes and options.

four12

Isn't the act of moving high-performance files to the outside defeated by logical block addressing? I thought no drives reported honest CHS stats to the BIOS anymore, instead using them as a proxy for the real figures, which only the drive knows.

kc2idf

@Brad N.: Or, how it compares to IOBIT SmartDefrag Beta? SmartDefrag does optimization, but I don't know if it's looking at the inside or the outside.

Linnet

@jaba:

The outside is the fastest area because more area passes under the head during each revolution and revolutions take a fixed time. More data per time period = faster

Generally:

This sort of thing is actually standard at datacenters and they integrated it with Vista for exactly that reason. If you run the math to compare buying a 10k rpm disk versus buying a 7.2k rpm disk of 2x the size and using only the outer half you'll find the cheaper disk (7.2k rpm rotation speed) wins every time.

Summary: The speed improvement from half-striping totally blows away the speed increase from a third more rpm. Bonus: you put the bootup and other seldom accessed stuff in the "unused" area and it's free.

pcx339

@jaba: Per revolution, the read/write head will be able to read (or write) more data on the outside edge than the inside edge. Head movement is what slows down data transfers.

jharbert

I like the concept of grouping like files together, but based on my experience I disagree that the outer tracks are that fastest place to put them to minimize the average seek time (which I assume is the point of doing this). Unless you have lots of free space, the center tracks will be the fastest to access on average, so I'd put the programs in the center & spread the data around the outer tracks, if this program lets you do that.

Actually, other than defraging large multi-segment files doesn't cache pretty much do this for you already as the most active sectors will stay resident longest in cache anyway?

BlogsOfSteel

Isn't the faster part of the hard drive closer to the inside, not the outside? Smaller circle, less area to find data, faster seek times.

jaba

Anyone know how this compares to Auslogics Disk Defrag?

Brad N.

@WiglyWorm: I tried a different defrag program for a few months in Vista and never found any noticeable difference in performance. Though, I never found any data problems either. I think you would be safe to try this app, but I would question its utility in Vista.

jonny6pak

Anyone know if this can reserve outer sectors for the page file?

harmx

@superbryant88: Yes but there's a caveat: Your programs won't perform any better as far as frame rates or anything, but the games will start up faster and maps will load quicker.

WiglyWorm

I use O&O Free defrag. It doesn't allow you to order the data, but it's a great defragging program.

heavylee-again

Supposedly Windows Vista does this automatically. So as much as I'd love to run this program, I'm afraid at what would happen if the two stop fighting for which programs should be placed in what location...

WiglyWorm

What are the chances that one could break their computer with this program?

Temoto

So with this i can put my games like Team fortress, COD, and stuff on the outer edge and it will access the data faster?......cool

That_Eagle_Scout!