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Whats the best Defragmentation Software


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Whats the best Defragmentation Software  

916 members have voted

  1. 1. Whats the best Defragmentation Software

    • Diskeeper
      233
    • O&O
      174
    • Perfect Disk
      180
    • System Mechanic
      7
    • Contig
      8
    • Power Defragmenter
      18


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after looking up that contig one, i'm not sure how that can be the best, doesn't seem like a defragger to me, just a file defragger?

I apologize for not being able to reply earlier, but the place at which I was staying for the weekend had done a major overhaul on their LAN... result being no connection on every floor but the first :rolleyes:.

To answer your question, contig is merely a console based application that accepts one argument- namely a file. You are correct in that without passing additional switches to contig, it will only defrag the file you tell it to. However, contig features a switch that allows it to do recursion on a subdirectory, which, if you were to type "contig -s C:", would licit the entire defragmentation of your hard drive.

Now, to turn contig into a full-fledged defragmentation tool, all you have to have is a shell that will pass it these arguments. This is where Power Defragmenter GUI comes in: excessive-software.eu.tt. With that and contig in the same directory, open Power Defragmenter, then select "Power Defrag" mode.

Does not run on its own in the background. It will defragment and re-allocate files associated with the Windows Prefetcher from time to time, but it will not automatically defragment all of your hard drives automatically. This is one of the new features that Microsoft stated it would try to include in Vista.
While Windows Defragmenter itself does not run in the background, it can be sufficed to say that, in essence, the portion of code that does run acts both complementary and partially supplementary to other defragmentation tools.

It was my mistake to imply that it did anything superlative to that. However, there aren't any other defragmentation tools that handle Windows' prefetching, so I wouldn't discredit that portion of the tool.

Does not do a good job!

Forgive me for summarizing, but I'd like to reaffirm the fact that nowhere was it mentioned that Windows Defragmenter performs well or is even adequate for the job. It was simply used as a base of reference for comparison with other tools.

To make my opinion clear, I do agree that Windows Defragmenter is another one of Microsoft's sorry attempts to provide a "one OS fits all" solution, but I don't turn my nose at the fact that it is a defragmentation tool nonetheless.

Also, the argument about continuously needing to defragment itself... how would the files related to the program become fragmented again? Sure, the first time, you need to defrag another 15MB or so of files. For me, that's 0.1% of my hard drive space - not a significant amount. Unless they were modified, overwritten, or changed in any other way, they'll stay right where they are. Fragmentation only occurs when files are created or changed - not read.
The problem is that these tools don't know whether or not a file is fragmented until they actually do a pass over it.

Granted, I don't believe this to be too taxing, considering my drive consists of hundreds of files defragmentation tools absolutely hate- namely, video files and large archives . However, I was simply making this point for the sake of argument(note that I called it a quandry, not a passage in my personal bible).

To address this point more thoroughly, though, I don't believe current defragmentation tools are doing all they should be. Specifically, they should be taking advantage of Windows' built in Indexing Service to find out if a file is fragmented or not, and then proceed accordingly.

Although, the same can't be said for anti-virus tools, as I find it hard to trust Windows in aiding in the security of itself.

As for your defragmentation habits, sure that's fine, but ask the average user (i.e. anyone on the street) if they would rather deal with defragging themselves, or use 1-2% of their RAM to have the system take care of itself. The single largest selling point with most maintenance/security software is the "automatic" part - i.e. you don't have to do anything.

Let me start out by asking you to re-evaluate who exactly our target audience is, because I honestly believe we aren't reaching the "average joe" via the MSFN forums. Most of the people on this forum are knowledgeable and aware of their computing habits. They also seem to realize that working with computers is a give and take relationship; ie: what you put into it is what you get back from it.

Now, about the so-called "average joe"...

I am now under the impression that they would enjoy their life being completely automated. I find this greatly disturbing and completely unacceptable.

The modern average joe has grown to depend on such automation so much that they've become over zealous lemmings(not to include politics, but this is especially true in the US), adept at clicking "OK" to every message box that pops up and opening e-mail attachments from unknown addresses.

Based on the worst past few viruses and spyware, most of which could've been averted had said "average joe" not accepted what was default or automated and actually bothered to pay attention to what they were doing before they did it.

And you think they should have more automation? If that's the case, they might as well just have one of those little birds that works on buoyancy.

It worked for Homer.

(Note: I am in no way trying to hold contention in order to offend anyone, but I honestly believe that on a forum where people come to modify Windows so that it's sleek, smaller, and faster, they would appreciate having as few background tasks as possible in order to ensure optimal performance)

Oh how I wish, I wish, I wish that I could install Windows on ReiserFS...

While EXT2 isn't as efficient as Reiser, you might want to check out this kernel mode driver for Windows, as it offers full support for EXT2 in Windows:

fs-driver.org

Edited by teqguy
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How so?

Assuming you're talking about his Firefox bashing, Mastertech's basis of argument is supported by one silly website, and while that website does have a few decent points, I don't believe it's worth debating.

While I find hardware debating(or flaming, if you will) completely pointless, I understand that it is partially valid, in that the only leg those people have to stand on is that there is some degree of pressure put on the decision of what hardware to buy. Software, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal... it's fairly simple to develop a preference, because you can always try before you buy.

However, to surmise my opinion on both would be this: Current software and hardware do more butting of heads than working together. The most feasible way to relieve this is either get better hardware, get better software, or when time and money persists, both.

Both Zxian and you commented on resource usage being superfluous, due to the fact that you have large amounts of RAM. My question to both of you is this: Would you still need that much memory if hard drives could keep pace with system memory? What about if applications were more efficient?

Furthermore, if you don't absolutely need a certain application running in the background at all times, why keep it there? Windows' scheduler does a decent job at allowing you to perform all of your system maintenance at a desired time. This would give you the automation you find useful, while not needlessly sucking up resources during downtime.

Edited by teqguy
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Would you still need that much memory if hard drives ould keep pace with system memory? What about if applications were more efficient?

When it comes to computers, I don't do things based on how things aren't. Applications aren't more efficient. Thankfully, the biggest step we can do to getting the most out of our RAM, is by nLiting Windows.

Furthermore, if you don't absolutely need a certain application running in the background at all times, why keep it there?
Hence, nLite. As for normal everyday applications, msconfig (strun.exe from Nirsoft for me). Services? services.msc (or serviwin from Nirsoft for me). We're getting off-topic, by the way.
Windows' scheduler does a decent job at allowing you to perform all of your system maintenance at a desired time. This would give you the automation you find useful, while not needlessly sucking up resources during downtime.

As I said before, I have less than 20 processes running at any given time (with the exception of gaming). If you have 512MBs of RAM and have 20 programs installed, I can obviously understand why you might do things differently than myself. I like to be in complete control of which programs are running and when they are running, so no scripts or automation for me.

Edited by Jeremy
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I like to be in complete control of which programs are running and when they are running, so no scripts or automation for me.

So, I take it that everytime you want to run Perfect Disk, you have to manually re-enable the scheduler and engine services that come with it?

If so, we're getting down to the meat and potatoes(don't worry, no food analogies this time) of my argument. Having to enable these services everytime I wanted to defrag is what killed the whole experience of using defragmentation "suites" for me, especially considering I get the same results with contig.

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So, I take it that everytime you want to run Perfect Disk, you have to manually re-enable the scheduler and engine services that come with it?

No, actually, I set both of them to Manual and the program runs when I open it.

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I've come up with a great solution that helps alot against fragmentation.

That is, convert drives to dynamic ones, and then create partitions that you mount in folders that you use for different stuff...

This is my setup:

C: (10GB partition for system, drivers and such) - Not striped

C:\Games (80GB partition for installed games) - Striped over 3 disks

C:\Program Files (40GB partition for installed programs) - Striped over 3 disks

D: (250GB partition I use to store my documents, ftp and other stuff that doesn't need to be defragmented very often) - Striped over 3 disks

S: (3GB partition for swap and temporary only) - Striped over 3 disks

The only partitions that really needs to be defragmented is C:, C:\Games and S:, all the others doesn't get fragmented alot and/or don't need to be defragmented.

But this doesn't stop the system becoming bogged down (Windows have always been like this!!) So when it happends I just refortmat C: - use my nLited installation (install takes about 15 minutes) and just mount all the partitions to the right folders again ;) reinstallation of most software goes really fast since all the files already exists and thus, installation just skip them.

This means I won't loose any critical data (exept your current desktop, I am thinking about mounting the desktop folder into it's own partition as well, but it might be overkill!), since it's stored on different partitions... So I can reformat with ease!

I also use striped partitions over 3 drives, which is very easy when you have dynamic drives.

Even if my computer have crashed once in a while (due to OC:ing and bad drivers), and that I've reformatted about 6 times; I use the same striped partitions. They are still healthy and have never failed! So I must say that software striping is alot safer and stable than hardware striping, but software striping may eat cpu during hdd read/write-intensive tasks, and doesn't give the same performance boost, but it's cheaper and easier!

Best regards,

Menion

Edited by Menion
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No, actually, I set both of them to Manual and the program runs when I open it.

That works too.

It might be nice to take it a step further and write a batch script that automatically kills them when the application closes, but I guess manually closing them would suffice.

Menion, a solution similar to that has already been mentioned, but I'm interested in dynamic partitions. Enlighten us please.

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It might be nice to take it a step further and write a batch script that automatically kills them when the application closes, but I guess manually closing them would suffice.

Ending them in Task Manager only takes a few seconds, I'm not that lazy.

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@teqguy - Ever heard of a guy called John Nash? He basically just said exactly what you did, only from an economics point of view. Companies could drive prices up if they worked together. In terms of quality, the same should hold (if everyone is nice and worked together). Unfortunately this just isn't how the world works.

As for the large amounts of RAM... I've installed Diskeeper on my girlfriend's parents computer (which only has 128MB of RAM), and it runs just fine for them. The 5% of RAM usage so that they don't have to worry is completely acceptable by their and my standards. Don't try to tell me that I should teach them how to use their computers because it's simply not worth my time or theirs. Give them a system that works and takes care of itself, and they'll be happy for years to come. Sure it's not a gaming system like Jeremy's or ripken's, or a mobile workstation like my laptop, but it does what they need it to - surf the web, check e-mail, write documents, etc etc etc. They don't need anything more.

As for keeping an application running in the background, if you've got the resources (i.e. you don't notice it during your average use), why NOT keep it running? That way, it's there when you need it and startup time is zero. Let's take Photoshop as an example. If you could keep Photoshop loaded into memory without any downside (which would be hard on just about any system), why wouldn't you? It would keep you from waiting 20 seconds each time you wanted to used it. If I could have every program I use loaded into memory with no downside, I'd take it. There's always the axiom - unused RAM is wasted RAM. If Windows XP wasn't as smart as it is with memory caching, then you'd definately notice things slowing down when you keep closing and opening programs.

All these "what if" comments are somewhat off-base, since that's simply not how things work! We have disk defragmenters because we're dealing with physical hard drives, not flash memory or RAM or whatever else. Hard drives are still miles slower than RAM, and for the next few years at least, they will be.

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I understand where you're coming from. However, accepting things for what they are denies the very essence of humanity.

To try to tone this discussion down a little, I'll comment on one line of your post and nothing more:

There's always the axiom - unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Well, what if you do, in fact, have tasks that need a tremendous amount of memory?

As I'm sure you're aware, encoding, rendering, and games aren't exactly light on resources.

There is never an instance where I can't find RAM to devote to a process. For example, during encoding tasks, I use my memory as a ramdrive, which is immensely faster than a hard drive.

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I understand where you're coming from. However, accepting things for what they are denies the very essence of humanity.

This is a good point if you're a spiritual advisor bringing people to Enlightenment, but when it comes to defragmentation software, it has nothing to do with religion or spirituality or whatever. You're dragging this way out of context. When it comes to the industry and the software that comes out of an industry, you just can't cry about how things should be, you have to bloody deal with how they are.

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This is a good point if you're a spiritual advisor bringing people to Enlightenment, but when it comes to defragmentation software, it has nothing to do with religion or spirituality or whatever.
Actually, the concept of striving for some sort of pinnacle transcends any specific forum(Why else do we upgrade?), as it just so happens to be the basic principle of Darwinism.
When it comes to the industry and the software that comes out of an industry, you just can't cry about how things should be, you have to bloody deal with how they are.

"Dealing with things as they currently are" is accepting that they will always(or at least for a very long, indefinite amount of time) be that way. This is what brings about conformity and makes new concepts and ideas dwindle.

To get back on topic, though, the way I "deal" with current software is that I don't use anything that can be deemed "bloatware". IMO, any defragmentation suite that has more lines of code devoted to GUI than to defragmentation is what I would consider bloat.

If what I call bloat, you call "features", that's absolutely fine... I was simply trying to introduce an alternative utility, because as this forum has demonstrated, there isn't software that suits everyone.

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I just have a vbs script that use Windows built in defrag and have been happy with it.

Const Hidden = 0,Normal = 1,Min = 2,HD = 2
Dim Act, Fso, Drv, HD_Report
Dim GB : GB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024
Set Act = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set Drv = Fso.Drives
For Each objDrv in Drv
If objDrv.DriveType = HD Then
DrvSize = objDrv.TotalSize / GB
DrvSize = Left(DrvSize,5)
DrvSpace = objDrv.AvailableSpace / GB
DrvSpace = Left(DrvSpace,5)
Used = DrvSize - DrvSpace
HD_Report = "Total size : " & DrvSize & vbcrlf & "Available space : " & DrvSpace & vbCrLf & "Used Size : " & Used
Act.Popup "Preparing To Defrag This Drive = " & objDrv.DriveLetter & "\" &_
vbCrLf & "Drive Volume Name = " & objDrv.VolumeName & vbCrLf & HD_Report , 5, "Defrag Drive", 0 + 32
Act.Run("Defrag.exe " & objDrv & "\ -F"),Min,True
End if
Next

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