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Hot: Commercial Disk Defragment Software - $12 AR
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"PerfectDisk is the only defragmenter demonstrated to increase fragmentation during portions of its run. Presumably this strategy is avoided by the other vendors because 1) it has the potential to significantly slow the defrag process, 2) it can result in greater net disk fragmentation in the event that the process is stopped early due to schedule constraints, and 3) it was shown to create numerous, persistent fragments in critical files such as large database files, as demonstrated in the following set of benchmarks."
-- Winternals Defragmenter White Paper
PerfectDisk is an aggressive free space consolidator, which is largely irrelevant unless one is working with very (very) large files on a heavily fragmented drive, if not actually counterproductive in the scenario tested above. PerfectDisk attempts to do a more thorough job in one pass at the expense of time, a philosophy that doesn't make the most sense given how dynamically data and free space is constantly changing. You may achieve 100% defragmentation and free space consolidation at one moment in time, but so what? Two seconds after the computer resumes its normal duties the data and free space structures are again changing significantly (as well as the needs of the file system and MFT).
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) has been refined over a decade with development assistance from Executive Software (Diskeeper), Intel, Microsoft, and Seagate to achieve a better 'working' defragmentation that actually improves over time through XP's background statistical analysis (Cache Manager) and prefetch mechanism.
German computer magazine c't did a comparison of Diskeeper Pro, MST, O&O, PerfectDisk, Norton SpeedDisk, and WDD integrated in XP SP2. WDD was the only defrag utility to actually and measurably improve performance (boot time)...and its free.
-- Winternals Defragmenter White Paper
PerfectDisk is an aggressive free space consolidator, which is largely irrelevant unless one is working with very (very) large files on a heavily fragmented drive, if not actually counterproductive in the scenario tested above. PerfectDisk attempts to do a more thorough job in one pass at the expense of time, a philosophy that doesn't make the most sense given how dynamically data and free space is constantly changing. You may achieve 100% defragmentation and free space consolidation at one moment in time, but so what? Two seconds after the computer resumes its normal duties the data and free space structures are again changing significantly (as well as the needs of the file system and MFT).
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) has been refined over a decade with development assistance from Executive Software (Diskeeper), Intel, Microsoft, and Seagate to achieve a better 'working' defragmentation that actually improves over time through XP's background statistical analysis (Cache Manager) and prefetch mechanism.
German computer magazine c't did a comparison of Diskeeper Pro, MST, O&O, PerfectDisk, Norton SpeedDisk, and WDD integrated in XP SP2. WDD was the only defrag utility to actually and measurably improve performance (boot time)...and its free.
Sure, if you have a Pentium 166MMX and Win95 on a 2GB hard drive. c't isn't the only test to find at best no measurable performance benefit among any of the commercial defragmenters compared to Windows Defrag, in either boot time or application startup. Sorry, but file and free space optimization tools largely have gone the way of the screen saver and RAM defragmenter.
Manually timing with a stopwatch? lol! There's your margin of error.
The best boot time improvements measured in objective tests before and after defragmenting a heavily fragmented volume is typically not more than 8 seconds, no matter which defragmenter produced the improvement nor how many successive times it was run. The c't test measured a whopping 6 seconds (26 v. 33) as the only boot time improvement of the bunch (c/o Windows XP Defragmenter). Application startup time improvements are going to be even smaller.
If you let your hard disk get to no fewer than 30% ~ 40% file fragmentation before running a defragger, by all means use PerfectDisk or other commercial defragmenter. But if you defragment your hard disk more often than once per year (e.g. once per month), you aren't going to do better than Windows Defragmenter.
I recently serviced a friend's Sony VAIO that is 3+ years old. She could not recall ever defragmenting the disk and none were scheduled to run. Total disk fragmentation was less than 25% (50% file fragmentation) after three years of use.
DaCurryman
Golden Member
Anyone is this would be necessary for a RAID 5 configuration I have. Since the purpose is to stripe data, I assume I can't use this since it'd move everything to one drive.
bodhammer
Member
I also have a raid 5 system (epox motherboard w/ the rocket chip). From the operating system level it sees the disk as a single device and it does report fragmentation. Running XP defrag does work and improve performance.
I don't thik it would move everything to one disk as you suggest.
Experts please chime in here!
Bod
I don't thik it would move everything to one disk as you suggest.
Experts please chime in here!
Bod
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