Topic: If you are serious about defragmenting...

[Pugnate]

Then use Diskeeper. Been using it for a while and it is quite good. The latest version is 2007 and is free to try for a month, though you can do what I do i.e. uninstall and reinstall.

linky

Works really well.

[ScaryTooth]

Yeah, I use diskeeper as well. It works quite well.

[Xessive]

I've been using O&O Defrag. Does a decent job, plus it can defrag in the background.

[Ghandi]

Trying it out now. I desperately need to defrag, its been about a year now.

[iPPi]

I remember the woes of defragging... generally speaking, if it is basically time for a defrag, a format is probably a better idea.

[Pugnate]

I used to follow that philosophy when I was a teen, but there are drives you have to defrag. Hey Gandhi let us know what you think.

[Quemaqua]

Sweet.  I'll give it a download.

[Xessive]

Defragging takes anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on how fragmented my drives are. Fortunately I can defrag multiple drives simultaneously. Either way, I usually just let my system do any maintenance when I'm not at home.. I hate down-time, so I always make sure my system is doing something when I'm not using it.

[Ghandi]

It seems to have worked well. It took well over an hour, but I just let it run while I was asleep. Apparently my C drive was in a critical state. Things seem to be running a little bit faster now, so it worked fairly well.

[Cobra951]

The Windows defrag utility wants 15% of the drive free in order to do its job.  That simply ain't gonna happen on any of my drives.  Does this thing have the same limitation?

[Xessive]

The Windows defrag utility wants 15% of the drive free in order to do its job.  That simply ain't gonna happen on any of my drives.  Does this thing have the same limitation?

I know for sure that O&O Defrag doesn't have a limit like that, and I would expect Diskeeper to be the same. I've been ableto defrag with just 2% freespace, although it took ages. The more free space you have the smoother the defrag process will go.

[Raisa]

still like Vopt.

[Xessive]

still like Vopt.

Wow, I felt a murmur in my heart when I saw their website: http://www.vopt.com/. It pains me, and I feel a strong compulsion to design one for them! Pro bono! Something simple, just something!

[Raisa]

hehhe. never seen their website.

[Ace_O_Spades]

Trying diskeeper, i am in dire need of ye old defrag

[Cobra951]

I'm not at all impressed with Diskkeeper so far.  After running for about 4 days in the background:

Job Report
Volume (C:):

Findings and Recommendations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found
    214 fragmented files and/or directories and 102,663 excess
    fragments.

    The average number of fragments per file is 1.64.

    Very heavy fragmentation detected on this volume. Keep
    Automatic Defragmentation turned on full-time to correct
    this problem.

    Also, free space on this volume is running low. Consider
    actions to free more disk space.

    The paging file on this volume is very heavily fragmented.
    Run Boot-Time Defragmentation to defragment the paging file
    on this volume.


Health
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Critical!

    The overall health of volume C: is severely affected

    The overall health is at "Critical" for the following
    reasons:

    1. The paging file is fragmented into 2012 pieces.

    2. The volume is heavily fragmented. The average number of
    fragments per file is 1.64.

    3. The free space on this volume is very low (15%), making
    it difficult to defragment the volume.

Note that it's complaining that the free space is "very low" at 15%, an assessment that hasn't changed at all since I first ran the program with 5% of space free.  Bear in mind that this is a 160-GB drive (152, actually), so the 15% it's complaining about is 23.5 GB.  That's bigger than the whole X360 hard drive.  Some notebooks still work with 20-GB drives.  WTF?!  It can't defrag my paging file at boot time.  It says that it can't find enogh contiguous space for 512 MB.  Create some, you piece of shit.  Isn't that what you're supposed to be doing?

[Pugnate]

I think 15% is the annoying norm. for all defrag progs.

[Cobra951]

I know that's what the Windows utility wants, and so I worked for hours to free up that much space.  DK was not grateful about my efforts in any way.

And again, percentage doesn't tell the whole story.  It's over 23 frigging GB of emptiness.  The biggest file I have is under 1 GB, so it can be copied to at least 23 different unique sets of memory on the drive.

[Cobra951]

After all the bitching I did, I thought only fair to post a followup.  Diskkeeper has finally done the job, and well too (but it did take weeks).  Here is the most recent report:

Job Report
Volume (C:):

Findings and Recommendations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found
    35 fragmented files and/or directories and 293 excess
    fragments.

    The average number of fragments per file is 1.00.

    Little or no fragmentation detected on this volume. You
    should keep Automatic Defragmentation turned on full time
    to maintain maximum performance.

    Also, free space on this volume is running low. Consider
    actions to free more disk space.


Health
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Warning!

    The overall health of volume C: is degraded

    The overall health is at "Warning" level for the following
    reasons:

    1. The free space on this volume is very low (20%), making
    it difficult to defragment the volume.

Before:


After:


The green diagonal stripes represent the paging file.  You can't see that in the "before" map because it's split into over 2,000 fragments.     That can only be fixed at boot-up time.  Funny thing is that it said it couldn't find enough contiguous space to do it.  Yet there it is.

Edit:  100% file defrag.  Didn't think it was possible.  There's still some MFT fragmentation, although much less than before.  I think I'm done.  I'm going to turn off the background process now.

Really after:

[ren]

I've been using Diskkeeper as well since this post. I liked it quite a bit more than Windows Defragger, though it definitely didn't do as much for me as it did for cobra.

[Pugnate]

It looks like Cobra hadn't defragged in a while maybe?

[scottws]

I just schedule C:\Windows\System32\defrag.exe to run once a month.  That was it doesn't excessively defragment the drive and reduce their lives, but the drives are always somewhat well defragmented.

[Cobra951]

I had never defragged this drive before.  Worse, maybe, I had cloned a never-defragged 40-GB drive into it (a 160-GB drive) when I first got it.   

I don't feel comfortable letting this software do full-time shuffling of my files around either.  I'm going to disable the background component within the next few days, and try to stay on top of periodic defrags after that.  I can try Diskkeeper's scheduler, but this trial software is going to expire soon.