What defragmenting program to use?

[Peru]

I uninstalled the trial of Diskeeper Pro Premier and installed a trial version of PerfectDisk.

The first time I tried to capture a VSH tape via Canopus (as I had been doing while testing the performance of Diskeeper) Pre El 3.0 froze. It was unresponsive at first, and then Pre El just closed by itself!

I tried three more times and the last try worked. I can't say for sure that it was PerfectDisk causing the problem, but this is the first time I've had any problems with Pr El since I installed a larger power supply, a dedicated internal drive for video, and two extra cooling fans for my three internal hard drives.

It may be my imagination, but I think that other applications were running faster with Diskeeper than PerfectDisk.

I've also thought about the option of "selected file defrag" for PerfectDisk-- Why would I need it if it is defragging on the fly, anyway? Diskeeper does have the ability to "defrag only fragmented files" manually.

So I'm now leaning towards Diskeeper Pro Premier, taking into account your recommendations and my recent experience.
I will give PerfectDisk another try by creating and editing the same project I used to test Diskeeper, just to attempt a less than scientific, somewhat objective comparison.

[Don Whitten]

I have been using Diskeeper Pro for a couple of years now without any problems. I do set it so it defrags at night only. I do a defrag before I do any video editing also. Haven't had any trouble but am knocking on wood right now also.

[RJ Johnston]

I uninstalled Perfect Disk 2008 and then downloaded and installed Diskeeper Pro. I had already tried Diskeeper Home. Using the Manual Defragmentation mode of Diskeeper I was able free up a large contiguous free space on both my drives. That was something Perfect Disk kept telling me I needed to do, but for some reason it couldn't create the free space. I really like Diskeeper.

As for defragmenting individual files, you can use this free utility from SysInternals:

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Contig.zip


For other utilities from SysInternals you can start here:

http://www.sysinternals.com

[RJ Johnston]

I purchased a license for PerfectDisk 2008 Professional after I received an email letting me know that I could get a 20% discount if I purchased by Monday. So final cost was $31.99 instead of $39.99.

After defragmenting system files, I solved the problem of consolidating free space that I mentioned in my previous post.

A feature I hadn't seen is the Space Explorer that shows the space distribution between files and folders inside a drive. You can drill down to individual files and delete them.

There are more options and control with PerfectDisk 2008 than with Diskeeper 2008 Home, which goes for $29.99. So for 2 dollars more I got the license for PerfectDisk.