Which defrag?

[Rebecca]

P.S. Aren't there some newsgroups you forgot to cross-post to?

Modem Ani

Why didn't _you_ add them? Do you expect someone else to do it for you?

 

[jt]

The native defragmenter is completely adequate unless you are running a
server.

"Don't Become a Defrag Junkie"
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDefrag.htm

P.S. Aren't there some newsgroups you forgot to cross-post to?

Perhaps. Since I was looking for opinions, I figured several xp groups
would procure more than simply one or two. Would you like to suggest other
helpful groups?

 

[jt]

The native defrag program is more than adequate. What more do you
want/need?

I dunno, because as I indicated I am a new user and know next to nothing
about xp or NTFS systems. Therefore, I asked. Thanks for your input.

 

[jt]

1. VoptXP.
2. Disk Keeper.
:
:
473. PerfectDisk
:
:
943. XP'x Built-in Defragger.
:
:
2,789. O&O.

Is there a reason you rank O&O so low? A friend recommended it to me, and
as I know next to nothing about commercial defraggers, I am simply curious.

 

[Guest]

New user of XP home w/ sp2. Is the native defrag adequate or should I get a
better one? Which is better, O&O pro or PerfectDisk?

That depends on why you think that the third party solutions are better than
the native defrag. In my mind, there are only three serious contenders for
this function: the native defragger, PerfectDisk, or Diskeeper. But which
one of these three is the best solution depends pretty much on what you need.


The native defragger will defrag your drive, but you have to do it manually
and you can only defrag one drive at a time. Also, it won't defrag your
pagefile, although the pagefile rarely should become fragmented anyway and if
it does, there is an easy workaround to get it defragmented again by other
means.

Diskeeper is the full-featured version of the built-in defragger (which
itself is licensed from the same software company that makes Diskeeper).
Diskeeper can defragment the page file, but much more important, it can also
defragment automatically in the background on a schedule, and it can even
determine automatically (without your intervention) how often it should
actually defragment (anywhere from one hour to one week, depending on how
quickly your drive tends to refragment between sessions). It calls this
feature "set it and forget it," which is exactly what it enables you to do.

PerfectDisk uses a totally different defragmentation strategy from the
built-in defragger or Diskeeper. It focuses on placing files so that the
least modified files are placed at the beginning of the disk. It also
focuses much more heavily on free space consolidation. Raxco, the maker of
PerfectDisk, claims that this approach results in faster subsequent
fragmentation runs and less fragmentation of newly created files.
PerfectDisk defrags can be scheduled to run in the background, but unlike
Diskeeper you must set the schedule manually.

I have extensively used all three, and in terms of overall performance I
cannot notice any transparent difference in how quickly they read and write
files on the hard drive (which is the purpose of defragmentation in the first
place). The biggest difference is that I have to run the built-in defragger
manually, while the other two can be scheduled to run automatically. Of the
three, only Diskeeper provides a method for measuring any performance gains
you might get after a defrag, but that's different from saying that the gains
you will get will be any greater than the ones you would get with the other
two programs. It does seem, however, that a drive defragmented with
PerfectDisk refragments at a slightly slower rate than the other two programs
-- but Diskeeper will usually defragment it sooner.

In the end, here is what I would suggest, although I won't get into the
technical reasons. If you have a new computer with lots of RAM and you don't
reboot it every day (e.g. you constantly leave it on, or you merely log out
but without rebooting the computer), you are probably best off using the
built-in defragger. If neither applies to you, you don't want even a little
defragmentation, and you don't want to mess with when or how often you should
defragment, use Diskeeper with "set it and forget it" enabled. If you want
to be slightly more proactive and also if free space consolidation is
especially important to you (e.g. you don't have a huge hard drive, or you
have lots of large files such as images and multimedia, then PerfectDisk may
be your best bet.

Ken

 

[Guest]

Hmm, do the words "vested interest" mean anything to you? I
notice that they are very careful to leave out any mention
of disk caching, paging, running from memory and all the
other things that are done today to speed up applications.

If an application does a read, process, write, read,
process, write cycle all the time there might be benefits
from defragging. Typical applications don't do that.

Only if an application is heavily I/O bound is there any
benefit from careful placement of files on disks. The only
real-world example I can think of is backup and from my
tests the benefits were only a few percent.

Although I disagree with you about defragmentation, you are actually closer
to the truth than many people might think, especially if you have a machine
with lots of RAM and you either leave your machine on all the time or you
merely log out without actually rebooting, i.e. a system in which lots of
program code and data end up in the RAM system cache and stay there for long
periods of time. The point is that -- other things being equal -- CPU and
RAM probably account for about 95-97% of system performance, with a
defragmented and junk-free hard drive accounting for the remaining 3-5
percent. There is no good justification for putting up with a 3-5 percent
performance hit by not regularly defragging doing idle periods, but on the
other hand the benefits of defragmentation are often overhyped, especially by
the third party defragmentation vendors.

Ken

 

[Guest]

I'm a little dubious of it's "smart placement". Perfectdisk works
better that DK (faster) on Fat32.

I am, too. In particular, PerfectDisk moves the MFT file to about 1/3
inside the drive. When I asked them about this, they referred me to a
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article that suggested that this placement optimized
performance. I read the actual article, and it actually said 3-5 GB inside
the drive, not 1/3 inside the drive. The difference between 3-5 GB and 1/3
inside the drive is huge, especially if you have a very large HD, as I do
(250 GB).

I also asked them about whether placing least modified files at the
beginning of the drive made sense from a performance standpoint, other than
the point that this setup minimizes refragmentation. I no longer remember
the exact explanation I received, but I do remember it making good sense at
the time. In any event, any performance drop by putting, say, an old but
very large music file closer to the outisde of the disk will probably be too
small to notice anyway. Even so, I like the way the native defragger puts
these behemoth files in a separate part of the drive from smaller files.
[Note: I think Diskeeper will also move these huge files closer to the
outside of the drive, while the native defragger leaves them further away.
In this regard, if I get a choice, I prefer the behavior of the native
defragger.]

Incidentally, I have found that both Raxco (PerfectDisk) and Executive
Software (Diskeeper) have excellent customer service and technical support.
One can learn all sorts of cool stuff about hard drives and fragmentation by
e-mailing them questions.

Ken

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

"If you have a reasonably large hard disk, there is little real advantage
in defragging a disk. In addition it exercises the disk which theoretically
reduces its life."

Conversely, if you don't defragment, then it it causes extra seeks on your
hard drive which theoretically reduces its life. So-o-o, darned if you do,
darned if you don't

Seriously, defragmentation doesn't reduce hard life expectancy with modern
hard drives. This ranks right up there along with other computer myths.
And, it doesn't matter how large of a hard drive you have, fragmentation
happens - it is designed to happen - its part of how the file system
function.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

Want to email me? Delete ntloader.

 

[14 Stone Ninja]

Perfect disk is complete crap but that aside cliff is just an incompetent,
bungling fool.
Sorry for being a top-posting **** but as the saying goes...

 

[Kadaitcha Man]

Greg Hayes/Raxco Software, <[email protected]>, the near-blind, odourless gas
bomb, and person who makes a living selling tannery remnants, squawked:

Delete ntloader.

If you insist.

(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Dave]

[Sorry. This message is no longer available.]

Why?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Probably because it does not have the amount of published research about it
that commercial defraggers like Diskeeper and PerfectDisk do.

 

[relic]

Is there a reason you rank O&O so low? A friend recommended it to
me, and as I know next to nothing about commercial defraggers, I am
simply curious.

It seem to get good comments from users, but I've never used/tried any piece
of software that ran as slow. I'm old enough to be retired, and I was
honestly afraid that I would die before it finished... I finally aborted it.
The biggest reason I rated VoptXP tops is its speed.

 

[jt]

It seem to get good comments from users, but I've never used/tried any
piece of software that ran as slow. I'm old enough to be retired, and I
was honestly afraid that I would die before it finished... I finally
aborted it. The biggest reason I rated VoptXP tops is its speed.

Odd. I downloaded and ran the trial version of O&O and it flew on my
machine. By contrast, the trial of PerfectDisk crawled and after it was
done, my system was slow as mud. I then ran O&O again and it was much
slower this time, but after it ran my system was at least fast again. I've
seen many recommendations for PerfectDisk, but after my experience I
wouldn't buy it with my neighbor's money.

 

[Dave]

I have used two, Diskeeper and Norton's Speed Disk which use to come
with Norton's Utilities. I stayed with Speed Disk because it does
something that Diskeeper doesn't... during defragging, it fills up
all the empty spaces left which seems (to me anyway) to cut down on
how quickly the whole thing gets fragmented again.

Regards,
DW

 

[Guest]

That's also part of the philosophy behind PerfectDisk, and PerfectDisk
otherwise does a much better job than Norton.

 

[relic]

Odd. I downloaded and ran the trial version of O&O and it flew on my
machine. By contrast, the trial of PerfectDisk crawled and after it
was done, my system was slow as mud. I then ran O&O again and it was
much slower this time, but after it ran my system was at least fast
again. I've seen many recommendations for PerfectDisk, but after my
experience I wouldn't buy it with my neighbor's money.

"Try it for free" link at the bottom:
http://www.vopt.com/VoptXP.htm

 

[relic]

Would you like to
suggest other helpful groups?

:-D

 

[User N]

Odd. I downloaded and ran the trial version of O&O and it flew on my
machine. By contrast, the trial of PerfectDisk crawled and after it was
done, my system was slow as mud. I then ran O&O again and it was much
slower this time, but after it ran my system was at least fast again. I've
seen many recommendations for PerfectDisk, but after my experience I
wouldn't buy it with my neighbor's money.

I recently played around with PerfectDisk and O&O Defrag. The target
was a 70% full 4.5 year old 20GB drive that has never been reloaded
with OS, but that has seen alot of use, particularly when it comes to
application installs/removes updates. FWIW, the drive has been regularly
defragged using the built-in. My goal was to see what each defragger
could do if time were of no issue, so I didn't play around with some of
the options. I did a boot defrag using PerfectDisk and it took a fairly
long time. There was little if any improvement in boot time, but the system
did feel a tiny bit more snappy. Later I did a complete by name type
defrag using O&O, and IIRC it took considerably longer to do its thing.
Again, there was little if any change in boot time. However, there was a
noticeable improvement in application load times, presumably due to
the restoration of application files proximity.

I need to spend some more time evaluating the defraggers, but I must
say that I do like the concept of being able to restore proximity. It
would be nice if users had even more control over where dirs/files
get placed (I'd experiment with putting archived and infrequently used
stuff at the highest LCNs).

 

[Guido]

"How many servers do *you* look after?"

He doesn't work in a ****ing restaurant or a "dive".