Diskeeper 2008

[nmX.Memnoch]

For those of you with maintenance agreements...expect to get your email soon. I got mine tonight. Here's a list of the new features...nothing on the main site yet though:

• NEW! Defrag with free space as low as 1% ensures optimum performance and reliability even under extreme hard disk conditions.
  
• NEW! Defrag under the heaviest fragmentation levels including millions of fragments.
  
• NEW! Intelligent defrag dynamically chooses which software engine will net the most performance gains on a given system or environment.
  
• NEW! Frag Shield 2.0 boosts reliability by automatically preventing crash-inducing fragmentation of critical system files.
  
• NEW! Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Compatibility mode leverages the data protection of VSS with the performance and reliability benefits found from defragmenting.
  
• NEW! Disk Performance Analyzer for Networks in the Administrator Edition provides real-time performance metrics on-demand or emailed automatically.
  

EDIT: Well, I logged out of the site and was presented with the following message:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we have temporarily taken the Diskeeper 2008 software storage server offline for enhancements. We expect the software storage and My Diskeeper Account to be fully operational again by Monday October 22nd, 2007. We will email you again at this same address to notify you when the server is back online.

Edited October 21, 2007 by nmX.Memnoch

[minotaur]

Wow, those are some awesome new features!

1% free space defrag

I suppose this is for the enterprise server editions. Any word on whether these new features will make their way to the desktop versions? I wandered over to the Diskeeper site, but there is nothing about DK 2008 yet. I would love to see a DK Pro 2008 with these new features!

[nmX.Memnoch]

I'm pretty sure those features are included in all editions of DK2008. They don't have any information on the main site yet but if you have a volume license with a maintenance agreement they now have a site where you can login and download the latest versions at any time.

http://my.diskeeper.com/account/

The only information they have about 2008 right now (and where I pulled the above information from) is on this page. They don't even have anything on their blog site about the release yet.

[nmX.Memnoch]

It's now been "officially" announced and the information is on the main site:

http://www.diskeeper.com/products/products.asp

[Zxian]

It's a pretty big PITA that Diskeeper sells various levels of their product, and in order to get all of the "super-duper" features, you have to shell out an arm and a leg. I think DK might run into the same problem with customers as we're seeing with Vista - too many product lines leads to customer confusion. The average joe had to deal with two versions of XP - Home and Pro. With the move into Vista, it's now... seven?

[nmX.Memnoch]

I don't think it's a pain at all. It doesn't even come close to comparing with all the different Vista editions. Vista is a desktop product with as many editions as the entire Diskeeper line up. Diskeeper has three desktop products (Home, Professional and Professional Premier) and two server products (Server and Server Enterprise). It's pretty easy to find the information on their site as well:

Home Edition:

32-bit only

Supports Vista Home Basic/Premium/Ultimate,all versions of XP and 2000 Professional

Defrags volumes up to 768GB

Professional Edition:

32- and 64-bit Support

Defrags volumes up to 768GB

Supports Frag Shield 2.0

Supports all versions of Vista, XP and 2000 Professional

--64-bit Support, Frag Shield 2.0 and additional Vista support are the differences from Home Edition

Professional Premier Edition:

32- and 64-bit Support

Defrags volumes up to 2TB

Supports i-FAAST 2.0

Supports Frag Shield 2.0

Supports all versions of Vista, XP and 2000 Professional

--Larger volume size support, i-FAAST 2.0 are the differences from Professional Edition

Here's a nice comparison chart for the desktop versions.

Server Edition:

32- and 64-bit Support

Defrags volumes up to 2TB

Supports i-FAAST 2.0

Supports Fragshield 2.0

Supports all versions of Server 2003 and 2000 Server, except for the Datacenter Editions of each

Server Enterprise Edition:

32- and 64-bit Support

No volume size limitation

Supports i-FAAST 2.0

Supports Fragshield 2.0

Supports all versions of Server 2003 and 2000 Server

--Larger volume support and Datacenter Editions support is the difference from Server Edition

For my purposes at work all I purchased was Professional Edition for my workstations/laptops and Server Edition for my servers (even my database cluster running Server 2003 Enterprise). This is probably the most any organization needs. Most home users only need either Home or Professional Edition.

A Home license will set you back $30USD, a Pro license is $50USD and a Pro Premier license is $100USD (those are full version prices, not upgrades). They have Family Packs available with reduced pricing for multiple licenses. If you're buying volume licenses you'll get even further price breaks. We have 110 Professional, 20 Server and 1 Admin licenses. To renew the maintenance agreement every year is roughly $2200USD, which is still less than purchasing the upgrade even every other year. The maintenance agreement gets us support and all version upgrades.

I hardly consider those prices high considering the performance/reliability benefit you get from having a proven product. I've been using Diskeeper since version 5 so yeah, I know the earlier versions weren't as good as they probably could've been. But DK2007 was awesome and DK2008 just builds on top of that.

I can tell you from personal experience that running Diskeeper across our entire organization has increased both performance and reliability of every one of our machines. I noticed the difference almost immediately on our desktops. It helps to keep our SQL databases humming along nicely as well (see this article for more info).

The ability to control the options and schedules centrally from within Diskeeper Administrator is an additional plus, as well as the option to control the settings through Group Policy with the included adm template.

[neo]

Nice...thanx for sharing