Best XP HD Defragmenter?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mindstar
  • Start date Start date
M

Mindstar

I've been using Diskkeeper 8 today to try defragment my drives.. Its ran
about 20 times now and my drives are still 20% fragmented.. am I doing
something wrong? is there a better alternative? (I'm sure Norton was
better.. but that was a long time ago)..
 
Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to do so.
It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run regularly (set and
forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd. Only if you run its
boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will it make the drive perfect,
and as soon as it's done and XP comes back up the drive will be fragged
again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be under
Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under W98 w/ FAT32
it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not like that anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are about
the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag, and you really
don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
 
There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first partition of
each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3 partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves everything
after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much better defrag for
those who think their PC really won't run properly without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
 
I have used DK also and currently use O&O. Back in the Amiga 500/2000 days
after a defrag I could notice a real speedup especially at boot time. I have
yet (in the past 20 yrs) ever seen any "noticeable" performance gain with a
freshly defragged hd.

IMHO it is much less critical these days with powerful cpu's and fast hd's
to defrag at all.

--

- Charlie


johnf said:
There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first partition of
each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3 partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves everything
after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much better defrag for
those who think their PC really won't run properly without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
--
johnf
Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to do so.
It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run regularly (set and
forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd. Only if you run its
boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will it make the drive perfect,
and as soon as it's done and XP comes back up the drive will be fragged
again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be under
Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under W98 w/
FAT32 it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not like that
anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are about
the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag, and you really
don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Agree totally with one exception?
If you run 'boot-time defrag' on Diskeeper, then open ANY app., close it and
then re-open it, it's abt. 4 times faster. That's great, but if you check
the amount of fragmentation after boot-time has run, it's a mess.
Haven't worked that one out yet.

--
johnf
I have used DK also and currently use O&O. Back in the Amiga 500/2000
days after a defrag I could notice a real speedup especially at boot
time. I have yet (in the past 20 yrs) ever seen any "noticeable"
performance gain with a freshly defragged hd.

IMHO it is much less critical these days with powerful cpu's and fast
hd's to defrag at all.

--

- Charlie


johnf said:
There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first partition of
each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3
partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves
everything after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much
better defrag for those who think their PC really won't run properly
without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
--
johnf
Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to do
so. It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run regularly
(set and forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd. Only if you
run its boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will it make the
drive perfect, and as soon as it's done and XP comes back up the
drive will be fragged again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be under
Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under W98 w/
FAT32 it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not like that
anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are about
the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag, and you
really don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
My guess is that you see some open spaces and therefore you make the
conclusion that it's still 20% fragmentized....wrong!

A lot of people make that same conclusion. It's even stated somewhere in
Diskeeper's manual that some open spaces have no influence on the speed,
it's sometimes even better!

Diskeeper is used by the majprity of companies who run a windows server and
is the best selling defragmenter in the world.
I guess those computer professionals are all wrong... doh!
 
Would agree that fragment free space doesn't hinder performance - a small
file might get saved next to a currently open file. It's when large files
are fragmented all over the drive that you might notice a drop in speed.
What defraggers don't do is put similar files together (e.g. a program and
it's dlls). O&O in date mode might if they have the same date and time and
you use date mode which I initially found slow since the files were all over
the drive.
 
Where did you get the info from with respect to Diskeeper being "used by the
majority...." and "best selling defragmenter...."? I would have thought the
defragmenter included in the WINXP package is the best selling in the world
:-).

It sounds as if you are in the business of marketing Diskeeper!

My experience suggests that all defragmenter products I have tried are very
similar in performance albeit they approach the task in different ways. Most
if not all of the claims of one product being "better" than the other are
based on non objective experience.
 
XP's defrag IS Diskeeper - a basic version designed by Executive Software
under contract to MS, so I guess that definitely makes it the best seller.
 
" open ANY app., close it and then re-open it, it's abt. 4 times faster. "

That's because once you open it, Windows caches (memory) it and the next
time you open, WIndows reads from cache (memory) instead of from the drive.

- 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.




johnf said:
Agree totally with one exception?
If you run 'boot-time defrag' on Diskeeper, then open ANY app., close it and
then re-open it, it's abt. 4 times faster. That's great, but if you check
the amount of fragmentation after boot-time has run, it's a mess.
Haven't worked that one out yet.

--
johnf
I have used DK also and currently use O&O. Back in the Amiga 500/2000
days after a defrag I could notice a real speedup especially at boot
time. I have yet (in the past 20 yrs) ever seen any "noticeable"
performance gain with a freshly defragged hd.

IMHO it is much less critical these days with powerful cpu's and fast
hd's to defrag at all.

--

- Charlie


johnf said:
There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first partition of
each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3
partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves
everything after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much
better defrag for those who think their PC really won't run properly
without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
--
johnf

Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to do
so. It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run regularly
(set and forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd. Only if you
run its boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will it make the
drive perfect, and as soon as it's done and XP comes back up the
drive will be fragged again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be under
Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under W98 w/
FAT32 it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not like that
anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are about
the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag, and you
really don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
"XP's defrag IS Diskeeper"

This is incorrect.

With Windows 2000, the built-in defragmenter was a joint development effort
between Executive Software and Microsoft. With Windows XP, the built-in
defragmenter is strictly Microsoft. Because it was originally based on
joint code, it still has Executive Software listed. Kinda like Internet
Explorer says "Based on NCSA Mosaic.".

- 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.
 
However, in the Diskeeper manuel, it also talks about how important free
space consolidation is. If there isn't a large enough piece of contiguous
free space, Diskeeper will not be able to defragment the pagefile.
Diskeeper also has an Improved Free Space defrag method - if it wasn't
important, they would not provide this ability.

- 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.
 
"Where did you get the info from with respect to Diskeeper being "used by
the majority...." and "best selling defragmenter...."?

It says so on the Executive Software web site. If they say it, then it must
be true - right :)

- 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.
 
Yes, and EVERY time anyone mentions DK on this NG you cannot resist coming
back with the same old egotistical Spam.
(Since when did you promote yourself to the title of MVP??)
--
johnf

- 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.




johnf said:
Agree totally with one exception?
If you run 'boot-time defrag' on Diskeeper, then open ANY app., close
it and then re-open it, it's abt. 4 times faster. That's great, but if
you check the amount of fragmentation after boot-time has run, it's a
mess.
Haven't worked that one out yet.

--
johnf
I have used DK also and currently use O&O. Back in the Amiga 500/2000
days after a defrag I could notice a real speedup especially at boot
time. I have yet (in the past 20 yrs) ever seen any "noticeable"
performance gain with a freshly defragged hd.

IMHO it is much less critical these days with powerful cpu's and fast
hd's to defrag at all.

--

- Charlie


There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first partition
of each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3
partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves
everything after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much
better defrag for those who think their PC really won't run properly
without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
--
johnf

Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to do
so. It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run regularly
(set and forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd. Only if you
run its boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will it make the
drive perfect, and as soon as it's done and XP comes back up the
drive will be fragged again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be
under Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under
W98 w/ FAT32 it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not
like that anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are
about the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag, and
you really don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I didn't. Microsoft did.

MVP and proud of it!

- 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.



johnf said:
Yes, and EVERY time anyone mentions DK on this NG you cannot resist coming
back with the same old egotistical Spam.
(Since when did you promote yourself to the title of MVP??)
--
johnf

- 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.




johnf said:
Agree totally with one exception?
If you run 'boot-time defrag' on Diskeeper, then open ANY app., close
it and then re-open it, it's abt. 4 times faster. That's great, but if
you check the amount of fragmentation after boot-time has run, it's a
mess.
Haven't worked that one out yet.

--
johnf

I have used DK also and currently use O&O. Back in the Amiga 500/2000
days after a defrag I could notice a real speedup especially at boot
time. I have yet (in the past 20 yrs) ever seen any "noticeable"
performance gain with a freshly defragged hd.

IMHO it is much less critical these days with powerful cpu's and fast
hd's to defrag at all.

--

- Charlie


There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first partition
of each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3
partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves
everything after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much
better defrag for those who think their PC really won't run properly
without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
--
johnf

Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to do
so. It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run regularly
(set and forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd. Only if you
run its boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will it make the
drive perfect, and as soon as it's done and XP comes back up the
drive will be fragged again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be
under Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under
W98 w/ FAT32 it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not
like that anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are
about the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag, and
you really don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Well try and act a bit more responsibly.

--
johnf
I didn't. Microsoft did.

MVP and proud of it!

- 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.



johnf said:
Yes, and EVERY time anyone mentions DK on this NG you cannot resist
coming back with the same old egotistical Spam.
(Since when did you promote yourself to the title of MVP??)
--
johnf

- 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.




Agree totally with one exception?
If you run 'boot-time defrag' on Diskeeper, then open ANY app., close
it and then re-open it, it's abt. 4 times faster. That's great, but
if you check the amount of fragmentation after boot-time has run,
it's a mess.
Haven't worked that one out yet.

--
johnf

I have used DK also and currently use O&O. Back in the Amiga
500/2000 days after a defrag I could notice a real speedup
especially at boot time. I have yet (in the past 20 yrs) ever seen
any "noticeable" performance gain with a freshly defragged hd.

IMHO it is much less critical these days with powerful cpu's and
fast hd's to defrag at all.

--

- Charlie


There's two functions I particularly like with Diskeeper.
I have 2 drives, both partitioned, with an OS on the first
partition of each.

1. By booting up in OS1, from there I can defrag the other 3
partitions.

2. If I boot to OS2, I can defrag OS1 from there, which moves
everything after the Paging file to before it, this gives a much
better defrag for those who think their PC really won't run
properly without it.

Wouldn't be without Diskeeper.
--
johnf

Diskeeper will NOT make the driver perfect, it is not designed to
do so. It mearly cleans it up as best it can, and when run
regularly (set and forget) it will keep it fairly well defrag'd.
Only if you run its boot-time defrag w/ all the options set will
it make the drive perfect, and as soon as it's done and XP comes
back up the drive will be fragged again. Don't worry about it.

Norton Speed Disk (for XP) is not as thourough as it used to be
under Win98, it too can only do so much w/ an XP harddrive. [Under
W98 w/ FAT32 it was super fast and very complete; too bad it's not
like that anymore].

PerfectDisk and OODefrag are the other options, and they too are
about the same. Under XP you really can't get a perfect defrag,
and you really don't need it.

BTW, most reviews seem to conclude that DisKeeper is "the Best".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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