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Best Disk Defragmenter?

What is the best Disk Defragmenter?

  • PerfectDisk

  • O&O Defrag

  • Diskeeper

  • Other, please mention in the thread

Results are only viewable after voting.
Berryracer

Berryracer

Platinum Member
I have been using PerfectDisk for years but was just wondering, is O&O Defrag or Diskeeper any better? and if so, then why would you say so?

I don't believe in FREE defragmenter as they only defragment the files but they do not place the most used programs / boot files at the beginning of the disk for that slight performance increase

I don't have an SSD drive nor can I purchase one since it is not widely available in Dubai yet and I don't even know if my Toshiba Satellite L655 which has a SATA HDD would support it :hmm:
 
On a side note, a question for people who do use PerfectDisk:

1) What is better to do, defragment the C: Partition, then perform a boot defrag via a reboot or vice versa? Which comes first?

2) Does PerfectDisk slow my computer down because it has a feature to prevent future file fragmentation?
 
Convert your DVD drive slot for an SSD. Lots of places offer international shipping. And I highly doubt that in the whole of Dubai you cannot find a single vendor who sells decent SSDs. Even in New Zealand we have SSDs.

Also, compared to the steaming pile of shit that is having your OS on an HDD instead of an SSD, the benefits of defragmenting your HDD are pretty much negligible.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
Convert your DVD drive slot for an SSD. Lots of places offer international shipping. And I highly doubt that in the whole of Dubai you cannot find a single vendor who sells decent SSDs. Even in New Zealand we have SSDs.

Also, compared to the steaming pile of shit that is having your OS on an HDD instead of an SSD, the benefits of defragmenting your HDD are pretty much negligible.
Click to expand...

Well the last time I checked was 8 months ago I'm sure now they have them.

But tell me something, if my laptop has a SATA 7200 RPM Hitachi 500 GB HDD now, do you think that the SSD drive will fit? Is the port the same? or would I have to buy a converter?

Please clarify

Thanks
 
The SSD will most likely fit in the hard drive slot, but I was under the impression you wanted to keep the HDD as well. I should point out, though, that putting a drive in the optical drive slot probably requires a converter or something, not sure of the specifics.

Yes, they should have the same SATA ports, for the HDD as well as the optical drive. But you should check, some optical drives still use IDE.
 
janas19 said:
Holy hell, and all this time I've used Disk Defragmenter in Windows.

System Tools 😱
Click to expand...

That works as well as any other. I've been hearing about awesome 3rd party defraggers for years, but curiously no one puts up any benchmarks. Until I see real repeatable benchmarks I'll keep assuming it's snake oil.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
The SSD will most likely fit in the hard drive slot, but I was under the impression you wanted to keep the HDD as well. I should point out, though, that putting a drive in the optical drive slot probably requires a converter or something, not sure of the specifics.

Yes, they should have the same SATA ports, for the HDD as well as the optical drive. But you should check, some optical drives still use IDE.
Click to expand...

Oh no I don't want to replace my BlueRay Drive, I just want to ditch my current HDD and swap it with an SSD. Will the ports be the same? or is it a different port?
 
lxskllr said:
That works as well as any other. I've been hearing about awesome 3rd party defraggers for years, but curiously no one puts up any benchmarks. Until I see real repeatable benchmarks I'll keep assuming it's snake oil.
Click to expand...

Well Ive read many good reviews about PerfectDisk in the past and to me it makes sense

If you just defragment using Windows Defragmenter, all you are doing really is placing all the data clusters near each other without any spaces (AKA fragments) between them, so it is faster to access a file

BUT, with paid Defragmenters such as PerfectDisk, it keeps track of your mostly accessed / used files to place the ones you use often at the beginning of the disk and thus giving you obviously a slightly higher performance. I know it may not be earth shattering, but hey, why not? every bit counts (at least for me)

Plus, I kinda like the fact that PerfectDisk prevents any future defrags in the hard drive, when you first open the program, it tells you how many file fragments it has preveneted, it supposedly does this while the disk is idle.

What I REALLY love about it is the boot time defrag. With that, your system is restarted, and before loading Windows, PerfectDisk defragments your boot files for faster startup times, and it also defragments your page file and hibernation files which are usually never defragmented by normal programs such as the Windows Defragmenter since those files are locked by the OS
 
Oh, I'm aware of the claims, and yea it makes sense when it's written down, but a lot of things make sense on paper, and don't live up to real world use.

On XP I used to defrag every few months when I felt like watching the colored lines align. I never benched it, but I never perceived any benefit. When you get down to it, perception is everything. The computer should /feel/ faster. Even if it can be benched as faster, but doesn't feel it, what's the point? It's spending time, and possibly money for something you can't feel. That's like paying for 1% more oxygen in your air. It looks good on paper, it can be benched as being better under some circumstances, but you wouldn't feel the difference.
 
lxskllr said:
Oh, I'm aware of the claims, and yea it makes sense when it's written down, but a lot of things make sense on paper, and don't live up to real world use.

On XP I used to defrag every few months when I felt like watching the colored lines align. I never benched it, but I never perceived any benefit. When you get down to it, perception is everything. The computer should /feel/ faster. Even if it can be benched as faster, but doesn't feel it, what's the point? It's spending time, and possibly money for something you can't feel. That's like paying for 1% more oxygen in your air. It looks good on paper, it can be benched as being better under some circumstances, but you wouldn't feel the difference.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I suppose this is true.

Good tip lxskllr: avoid the hype, focus on benchmarks and results. 😀
 
Well speaking of benchmarks, I know this may not seem like a big deal, but after a boot time defrag with PerfectDisk I was able to do a full reboot 5-6 seconds faster, benchmarked with bootracer
 
Matrix Leader said:
Oh no I don't want to replace my BlueRay Drive, I just want to ditch my current HDD and swap it with an SSD. Will the ports be the same? or is it a different port?
Click to expand...
They'll be the same.

Matrix Leader said:
Well Ive read many good reviews about PerfectDisk in the past and to me it makes sense

If you just defragment using Windows Defragmenter, all you are doing really is placing all the data clusters near each other without any spaces (AKA fragments) between them, so it is faster to access a file

BUT, with paid Defragmenters such as PerfectDisk, it keeps track of your mostly accessed / used files to place the ones you use often at the beginning of the disk and thus giving you obviously a slightly higher performance. I know it may not be earth shattering, but hey, why not? every bit counts (at least for me)

Plus, I kinda like the fact that PerfectDisk prevents any future defrags in the hard drive, when you first open the program, it tells you how many file fragments it has preveneted, it supposedly does this while the disk is idle.

What I REALLY love about it is the boot time defrag. With that, your system is restarted, and before loading Windows, PerfectDisk defragments your boot files for faster startup times, and it also defragments your page file and hibernation files which are usually never defragmented by normal programs such as the Windows Defragmenter since those files are locked by the OS
Click to expand...
As I said, not that much difference. There's a big leap between theory and practice, and this is one of those things where the leap is too big.

If you want, you can run a blinded controlled trial of these defragmenters vs the Windows default and other free ones. Just clone a system image and compare before/after for each product.

Of course, the whole thing is redundant with an SSD...
 
Matrix Leader said:
Well speaking of benchmarks, I know this may not seem like a big deal, but after a boot time defrag with PerfectDisk I was able to do a full reboot 5-6 seconds faster, benchmarked with bootracer
Click to expand...

Ok. But then to build on that, could you compare those results to Disk Defragmenter?

I'm not trying to derail your thread, just interested in finding the truth.
 
Matrix Leader said:
Well speaking of benchmarks, I know this may not seem like a big deal, but after a boot time defrag with PerfectDisk I was able to do a full reboot 5-6 seconds faster, benchmarked with bootracer
Click to expand...

Ok, that's something. Now the thing to do would be turn off all defragging for a couple months, and then use the built in defrag and see if it improves also. You won't be confirming by repeat trial, but it'll give an idea of what your dealing with. You could turn off defragging again, and repeat the PerfectDisk trial in a couple months to see if the results stand.
 
Defragging should be done very VERY infrequently on most computers. The only machine that I defrag more than monthly (some almost never) is my primary HTPC recording machine. That box is always recording 4 HDTV streams concurrently on a single drive, which tends to be pretty taxing on that drive. Those programs are also deleted and replaced constantly, leaving a very fragmented drive.

I like Puran Defrag free. It works great, is more configurable than windows defrag, and its free. Don't pay for defrag programs.
 
lxskllr said:
That works as well as any other. I've been hearing about awesome 3rd party defraggers for years, but curiously no one puts up any benchmarks. Until I see real repeatable benchmarks I'll keep assuming it's snake oil.
Click to expand...
And it works fairly well. Microsoft uses a Diskeeper variant, AFAIK.
 
Interesting thread....

Wish I had the time to really test my system both with Windows Defragmenter vs PerfectDisk to come up with actual numbers but I don't 🙁
 
lxskllr said:
That works as well as any other. I've been hearing about awesome 3rd party defraggers for years, but curiously no one puts up any benchmarks. Until I see real repeatable benchmarks I'll keep assuming it's snake oil.
Click to expand...
Appears there was a bench did, over 3 years ago.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_disk_defrag_difference

I'm going to assume that offerings of today vary little from what was out back then.

Although I'd like to see a more in-depth benchmark test ran using more programs than what's out today.
 
Last edited:
SaDiZTiKStyLeZ said:
Appears there was a bench did, over 3 years ago.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_disk_defrag_difference

I'm going to assume that offerings of today vary little from what was out back then.

Although I'd like to see a more in-depth benchmark test ran using more programs than what's out today.
Click to expand...

Enlightening, and expected. The only time I've seen defrag make a noticeable impact on performance was on thoroughly thrashed systems(in XP, showing red across the whole graph). On anything in the realm of reasonable, I never noticed a difference.

When I was on Windows XP, I'd defrag every few months or so. Usually when ever I wanted to see the graph change. I got a peculiar enjoyment watching it rearrange files :^D On Vista, I left the weekly defrag schedule, and never looked again. I don't defrag at all on Ubuntu or Debian :^)
 
Defrag is a must on systems with smaller hard drives that are usually loaded to the brim.

Best defrag is lots of free space 🙂
 
Given how well the defraggers seem to do in review, I'd like to make a +1 for Mydefrag. It might not help, but at least it won't cost you anything.

SaDiZTiKStyLeZ said:
Appears there was a bench did, over 3 years ago.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_disk_defrag_difference

I'm going to assume that offerings of today vary little from what was out back then.

Although I'd like to see a more in-depth benchmark test ran using more programs than what's out today.
Click to expand...
So basically, they're even worse than useless... :hmm:

The only really surprising thing was how well Vista's own defragmenter seemed to do. I would have liked, however, for them to have run a much heavier initial load sequence - multiple installs and uninstalls of programs, file transfers of different sizes, etc. It would have been better to simulate months of heavy use rather than a week of (in my opinion) fairly standard use.
 
Aside from the popularity of MyDefrag and the ability to tweak scripts, I've never seen it have any improvement over my other favourite defragmentation utilities.

I'd actually make a vote for Auslogics Disk Defrag - it's not an "uber-techie" utility, but one neat feature is the ability to defrag and optimise WITH the system files of Windows in the fast disk access areas of the HDD platter(s).

Piriform's Defraggler [Piriform being the well-known developer of CCleaner] I also like - and you can get a portable version of that.

Both of those utilities are free.
P.S. With the Auslogics defrag tool, don't do it through their website - it'll link to CNET and have those abnormal [I'd rather not use a harsh word - I don't want to name and blame someone/something and then turn out to be wrong or just rude] installers. Instead, download it from FileHippo. 🙂
 
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