Best defrag for WinXP NTFS?

[Slickone]

Reading through past threads, quite a few recommend Diskeeper, but several also say that PerfectDisk is better than Diskeeper. A few recommend O&O, and 1 or 2 say Power Defrag, and Norton SpeedDisk. One person said Diskeeper's boot time defrag corrupted his WinXP.

Has no one done a test to find which produces the best results, is the quickest, and safest, etc? Also test on a dual boot system (98SE/FAT32 and XP/NTFS). We need to 'settle' this. I would have created a poll, but it would have just showed which is the most popular.


I wonder the same thing for Ghost and DriveCopy, as well as for Partition Magic, Paragon Software's Partition Manager, and Ranish's Partition Manager and their boot managers.

 

[Smilin]

I had some serious problems with an older version of diskeeper. At the time it was causing an occasional bluescreen on my NT 4.0 Enterprise servers. I've also had some problems with it since with windows 2000 and XP. In each case I've not spent any time tracking down and fixing the problem so there may be a very simple solution I dont know about. In any case I don't use diskeeper any longer regardless of version.

I started using Norton SpeedDisk again recently and haven't had any trouble. It's not noticeably faster but it does complete in one pass. I'm kind of fond of this program from back in the DOS days. This program has been one of Norton's flagships for a long time now and it's never really given me any trouble.

As for Ghost - it's always met my needs so I've never really evaluated anything else.

 

[Slickone]

Any other recommendations?

 

[Nothinman]

You're disk has to be extremely fragmented for it to affect performance even a little bit, it's really a moot point. The built-in util is 'good enough' for most people, but if you feel the need to spend money on one use rock/paper/scissors and see which one wins =)

 

[corkyg]

Basically, I did what Notinman suggests . . . I started with the built in (crippled Diskkeeper), then NSW 2003's Speed Disk, and IU got both DK 7.0 and PerfectDisk by Raxco. After using them for a week or so, I decided that PerfDisk was the best for me.

NTFS creates a lot of fragmentation because of its immovable and unadjustable MFT Reserved area. P/D handles this very well until the file area exceeds the size of the MFT Reserved area (you don't see those areas except on P/D.) Then you have to find a way to move that reserved area farther down the disk. I learned how to do that - you convert the drive back to FAT32 - then optimize it, and then convert back to NTFS. That will move the reserved area away from the file area just enough to provide some freeboard between them.

I never use defrag only - always optimize fully and I do that about every other day, especially with NTFS.

 

[Nothinman]

The only reason fragmented files may affect performance in a noticable fashion is if you can't afford any seeking at all, the only people this really applies to are the ones doing huge A/V capture and edits. And even they can afford the seeks with a fast enough drive, I have a SCSI3 15K RPM drive with 8M cache that does ~50M/s I/O, if I do uncompressed PAL that'll need ~35M/s so I've got a lot of wiggle room. (Not that I'm an A/V guy heh)

The prefetching technology in Win98SE used to intentionally fragment files to make loading them quicker, because when an app is run the exe is only loaded via demand paging as necessary, same with support libraries. Running 1 executable may need to load 35 parts from 7 libraries in random order so having all those files perfectly contiguous actually makes loading them slower.

Watching PerfMon for "split IOs" on your disk will show this. You won't find very many, not at least as a proportion of the total IOs on the disk. Even though a file may be "fragmented", most of the fragments would have to be smaller than 64KBytes (the NT's default transfer size) for it to matter.

Unless you have an extremely high number of "split IOs", you're wasting your time defragging.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Unless you have an extremely high number of "split IOs", you're wasting your time defragging.

Well, I only optimize when I have nothing else to do - and I have found it helps promote stability - going back to Win 95, 98, SE and ME, I always had extremely stable systems. Malfunctions, freezes, etc. were extremely rare. It only takes about 3-4 minutes to optimize if you do it frequently. If you wait several days it becomes a big job that can take as long as an hour or more.

My goal is to always have zero fragmentation - and I usually achieve it. Performance is not the reason - stability and reliability are. I also run Norton WinDoctor after every software installation or uninstallation. That gets rid of the registry trash programs leave behind.

 

[Nothinman]

Well, I only optimize when I have nothing else to do - and I have found it helps promote stability

Fragmentation doesn't affect stability in any way at all unless you have bigger problems like data problems on disk or in memory. Win9X is a really bad test subject because it's so random in the way it works or doesn't anyway.

My goal is to always have zero fragmentation - and I usually achieve it. Performance is not the reason - stability and reliability are.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

 

[RVN]

I've been using O&O Free for two years and have moved to the Professional edition. Speed Disk never moved me and Diskeeper, although fast doesn't seem thorough.

I reccommend O&O.

 

[Slickone]

^

 

[Slickone]

^

 

[vexingv]

i like raxo perfectdisk...very quick and lotsa features

 

[TheWart]

I can't say I have tried all the abovementioned software titles myself, but Diskeeper has worked for me for almost two years and the boot-time defrag has never corrupted any of my three WinXP computers. Just my $.02

 

[CrowDog]

Unless you have an extremely high number of "split IOs", you're wasting your time defragging.

So whats the fuss about defragging then...why have I always been told to defrag every few months to improve system performance? It must be a mental thing then because after I run defrag things seem to be snapier (Maxtor 20gb 54k rpm).

Also, is it true that defraging is tough on a hdd? I was told that defragging alot will wear out a drive.....and on that note is it also wear to reformat?

 

[NEVERwinter]

I found that Diskeeper is the faster than the other. And I don't experience problem with WinXP NTFS.
But I found that Diskeeper can't defrag your HDD if it's too full, it will ask you to defrag several times, so I use Speed Disk to defrag a full HDD.

Both never fails me.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Well, I only optimize when I have nothing else to do - and I have found it helps promote stability

Fragmentation doesn't affect stability in any way at all unless you have bigger problems like data problems on disk or in memory. Win9X is a really bad test subject because it's so random in the way it works or doesn't anyway.

My goal is to always have zero fragmentation - and I usually achieve it. Performance is not the reason - stability and reliability are.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

what he said. defragging is only a performance boost, and often a very small one.