What Defragmenter do you all use?

[Aaron]

This question only applies to anybody using NTFS in Windows XP.

I have doubts about Diskeeper 6 second edition because it was released to the public before NTFS 5.1 was finalised.

[MadDolph]

I find the defragmenter from XP simple to use and clear.It does about 95% of what i would want it to do.

Its a lot faster than the prevous MS-ones i have seen.

The only thing is that it does not fill out the beginning of the disk.

Something else is that i do not see a big lack in speed with a fragmented drive as i was used to before...

Dolph

[DeviLduck]

Back when using W2K, I switched to DK from Norton. All through the various incarnations of XP, up to now XPcorp, DK is still my favorite.

Very fast in general & you're not locked into useless unnecessary settings, like with Norton. The Paging file & MFT frag guard can be configured at will & used when you want. Depending on your system setup, you need control over this function, for optimum performance.

By the way, I only use NTFS partitioned Disks.

[XPerties]

Well I was wounder what was the best way so I did some eXPerianting. This is on XP running in NTSF. I used HD Tach to test the results and it was done over a 4 week span. After using XP Defrag, and Nortan SystemWorks 2002.........XP Defrag was awfull compared to systemworks. I had a hugh advantage in the benchmarking between these 2 Defrag Ultilites.

-Chris

[Aaron]

I heard Norton Speeddisk 2002 is good, it has the ability to move the paging file to the front of the hard drive, something which past commercial NT Defragmenting apps hasn't done before.

[[Huey]]

i just use the defragger that comes with XP... works good enough!!

[FthrJACK]

i use the deault (disk keeper) too, works fine and does the job in minutes not hours (LOL @ all those win98 user who use the standard defrag )

[Sonny]

Try Perfect Disk 2000 at http://www.raxco.com/products/perfectdisk2k it seems to work well and looks at lot like Nortons Speed Disk.

[Aaron]

The reason why I don't like PerfectDisk and always haven't, is because it puts half of the files at the front of the disk, and the other half at the end of the disk. I have to ask... "why?!!!"

Data loads a lot faster when its at the front of the disk, so most other commercial defragmenters place data at the front.

[Sonny]

When you bring up the start-up screen, Right Click the Drive to be defragged and select the file placement you desire. This will allow you to place files the way I think you are saying:

1. Rarely Modified

2. Occasionally Modified

3. Frequently Modified

[CanadianM24]

The reason why I don't like PerfectDisk and always haven't, is because it puts half of the files at the front of the disk, and the other half at the end of the disk. I have to ask... "why?!!!"

Data loads a lot faster when its at the front of the disk, so most other commercial defragmenters place data at the front. [/quote:341c04d8f9]

The data at the END of the disk is faster, not the beginning. Same is true for CD ROM drives - do a search to find out how variable speed CD ROM drives work. I just read an article about how XP takes advantage of this -

"For example, XP watches which applications you use and, once every 3 days during idle time, it will automatically place the associated files near one another on the hard drive and closer to the more dense outer edge of the disk. This reduces the seek times and should improve application launch speed, especially on larger hard drives."

find the whole thing at

ht*p://www.zdnet.com/feeds/cgi/framer/hud0002500/www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2809517,00.html

[Aaron]

Yeah, when I said front, I meant the outer edge of the disk.

end = inner disk

[Guest aMb]

I just use the default XP one too.

[Rick]

I d/l'ed latest post of diskeeper from Aaronxp last night and it was very slow for me...I just had it do one partition of my hard drive that was only 10GB's and it took over an hour? It was very fragmented granted. When I used ME (don't remind me) there was a software called VoptMillineum that I used and it was super-fast. I mean 5 minutes fast for the whole hard drive. I am interested to know if they made an XP version. Has anyone else heard of this? Any pro's or con's to it?

Rick

[Aaron]

if it was slow... were you using FAT32 in XP?

Pretty much all commercial defragmenters are really fast in 9x/ME operating systems (taking 5-10 min) But they're slow on NT systems using FAT32.

Diskeeper 7 on FAT32 Win2k: 3-4 hours

Diskeeper 7 on NTFS Win2k: 5-10 minutes