What defragmenting program to use?

[Peru]

I'm getting tired of using the defragger that comes with Windows.

I am considering using one of the versions of Diskeeper 2008,
http://www.softwareshelf.com/products/m ... t_home.htm
as it says that it can defrag "on the fly' and do multiple drives at once.

I use Pre El 3.0 on Windows XP Media Center Edition
Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM, 512MB Nvidia graphics
500GB HDD main drive, 500GB HDD for video, 500GB HDD backup

What defragmenter do you recommend?

[VernonRobinson]

Peru,
I have used Diskeeper for several years without incident. I use Diskkeeper Professional. It seems to work as advertised. I notice no significant performance hit and the level of defragmentation is low to non-existent. Granted I also have plenty of disk free space. This is a necessity for editing video. If you do not have enough available free space, fragmentation will take a toll on your editing.

Regards,
-Vernon

P.S. I believe that the version of the defrag software in Windows is a watered down several versions old copy of Diskeeper. I either read it or came to that conclusion myself. But it has been so long since I used the Windows defragmenter that they may have changed by now.

[Steve Grisetti]

I'd be wary of defragging software that works continuously in the background. It often interrupts capture and DVD creation by continually trying to defrag your drive.

Better to set the software to automatically defrag your drive in the middle of the night.

[Peru]

Thanks, Vernon and Steve.

I'll follow your suggestions.

[RJ Johnston]

The copyright for Windows Defragmenter is made by Microsoft and Executive Software International, Inc.

After doing a search for that other company, I ended up at http://www.diskeeper.com. There is a home version for $29.95:

http://www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/home/trialware.aspx

[VernonRobinson]

I'd be wary of defragging software that works continuously in the background. It often interrupts capture and DVD creation by continually trying to defrag your drive.

Better to set the software to automatically defrag your drive in the middle of the night.

Steve,
Maybe I have power to spare, but the latest push behind Diskeeper is that it senses system load and does not hog resources. If the machine is marginal I can not guess how it will behave.

[Bobby]

I ditto the comments on Diskeeper. I have had it for years, has never failed, and does not put too much of a burden on the PC when running.

But I do have two icons on my desktop to start and stop the Diskeeper process. Actually, they are batch files, and also suspend my automatic program (Second Copy). I stop these processes when doing video work.

If anybody is interested, the command line to stop the Diskeeper process is:

net stop "Diskeeper

and just do "start" to start it again.

Bob

[RJ Johnston]

In the trial version I downloaded today there is an option to turn off defragmenting when there is other disk activity. I'll see how it goes.

[Bobby]

I am still using V9, so I may not be up on the latest controls.

Bob

[RJ Johnston]

It's going on day 3 now and I have to say that I am pleased with the results of the trial of Diskeeper 2008 Home edition. Thanks for starting the thread, Peru.

[VernonRobinson]

It's going on day 3 now and I have to say that I am pleased with the results of the trial of Diskeeper 2008 Home edition. Thanks for starting the thread, Peru.

Robert,
Been using the Diskeeper tool for years. It works pretty much as advertised. Set it and forget it.

Regards,
-Vernon

[Ron]

Been using the Diskeeper tool for years. It works pretty much as advertised. Set it and forget it.

Ditto, and it's 5-10 times faster too.

[RJ Johnston]

Here's another deframenter being advertised on Windows Secrets newsletter.

http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/DiskMagik/

[Peru]

I've been using the trial of Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier for a few days and it seems to work well with Pre El.

This supports drives up to 2TB. The Home and Pro versions only support up to 768GB. I now only have 500GB drives, but one day I will probably need 1TB (external for archiving, maybe).

I am now trying Perfect Disk:
http://www.raxco.com/home_office/home_p ... sional.cfm

It has unlimited drive size support. It also can defragment selected files only, instead of defragging the whole drive.
Perfect Disk can also defrag flash drives. The interface is also a bit less overwhelming than Diskeeper, but this is a minor consideration.

I want to give them both a good trial before I make a final decision.
It's an awful thing to have to decide between two similar programs when they both work well!

[RJ Johnston]

I tried DiskMagik, but I didn't like it quite as well as Diskeeper 2008 Home. At one point DiskMagik took all the CPU cycles and I couldn't even stop it, and my screen became cluttered because it couldn't be refreshed. Diskmagik also said that I should defrag my drives. That was after I defragged them with Diskeeper. But Diskeeper uses two different strategies, one for when Automatic mode is on and one for when it is off. With Diskeeper the files can be fragmented, but the performance is optimal. So DiskMagik sees fragmented files and reports that the disk needs defragmenting. Two different strategies.

I can get DiskMagik for $29.95 less 25% discount by going through the Windows Secrets newsletter.

Now I'll have to check out Perfect Disk.