Disk Defragmenter

[tubui]

I have a new hard drive, and I want to take care of it as best as I could.

I barely defrag my old hard drive.. I was wondering, how daily should you defrag your hd? One every month? Or what?

Also if there are things beside defraging to keep the hard drive clean and alive, feel free to add.

[dman]

http://www.dirms.com/

dirms (do it right, microsoft) is a great, free command line defragger. It can move files by last access date, and move all files to front of drive. set it up in task scheduler to run every night or as often as you like.

the other program on this site, buzzsaw, is a real-time defragger. meaning it will defrag continuously when system usage is below 5%.

They are both free and work at least as good if not better than stuff you have to pay for. Much more effective than XP standard defragger.

Be sure to run chkdsk often too.

[OcDevil]

Raxco PerfectDisk is also worth mentioning.

In my opinion a lot better than the built in defragger in Windows

Only downside is that it's not free.

http://www.raxco.com/

[tubui]

Thanks guys, but how often should I defrag?

[dman]

Thanks guys, but how often should I defrag?

No right answer to this, but "often" should cover it. I have scheduled task set up to run dirms every morning at 3:00 AM, along with virus and spyware scans. That way I never have to worry about "running" them.

[azagahl]

Thanks guys, but how often should I defrag?

IMHO, once a week is more than adequate.

It takes an awfully long time for fragmentation to build up to the point where your PC slows down noticably. I bet most users could go on for a year without noticing a slowdown. However, I'd be more worried about scenarios where your hard disk gets corrupted or damaged and you can't recover much data because it is scattered randomly all over your disk.

Executive DiskKeeper is a good defrag program, free for personal use I think - http://www.executive.com/coverpage.asp

[systeman]

WHY not using OS-self defrag tool? I think this will be enough.

And how frequent to do defragment? I agree that it verifies depend on the way you use HDD. Too often defragment will make more negative effects to HDD health.

[albator]

you have the option to do it while in screensavers mode with diskkeeper.

But I think that the best thing is to keep only system files on the c: That way this drive will always be defrag.

[mattofak]

Lol, you guys do realize that Executive DiskKeeper made the internal OS defragger? Really, there is no optimum way of telling someone this is how often you need to defrag, depends on how you use your computer, if you edit your files a lot, then you should defrag a lot, if you dont, then no worries. However, my practice is essentially what albator recommends, enable defrag whilst in screensaver mode, and then every six months i do a full defrag with Executive DiskKeeper professional... and that seems to work fine for my development machine, and home machine.

[Tarun]

Thanks guys, but how often should I defrag?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What is the usage amounts on your computer. Such as how often, what do you use it for, etc.

It's kinda funny seeing everyone put in their two cents worth, but not asking much about the user and their question. After reviewing, no one asked this user what they use their computer for and such. A better answer comes from knowing more about their needs.

[N1K]

I need to install a defragmenter on the new windows installation.

I can't decide between Perfect Disk and Disk Keeper.

What do ya all think of this two defragmenters?

[mattofak]

DiskKeeper is more for a single computer with not so big of a hdd, whereas Perfect Disk is for network installs with huge a** file servers in a mission critical envio where proc time counts...

[N1K]

Well, my situation is: 2x180GB Maxtor RAID 0 disks...so I guess it would be disk keeper..

[mattofak]

Thats what I would go for, so long as you defrag pretty routinly, it doesnt matter how much time the defrag engine takes, because it will be pretty small...

[Tarun]

I would suggest PerfectDisk, as it consolidates free space so much better than Diskeeper.