Thinkpads Forum

What's the best defrag/system maintenance software suite? Diskeeper pro seems really good, but I thought I'de ask you guys what your thoughts are.

I strongly recommend PerfectDisk 8. An excellent all-around defragmenter for the system, both online and offline; there are quite a few threads, such as [ur=http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=34583]this one[/url] and this one here that talk about it.

I use diskeeper pro on all my machines and love it.

I also use Diskeeper Pro, it will defrag in the background so you never actually have to defrag.

Scott

I read that constant defragment is not good to HD. So I actually do not use any defragment software. Once a month, I use the built-in software to defrag the system partition.

If you use NTFS or any other modern file system there is no need to defrag your HDD on a regular basis. Only this dumb FAT file system needed to defrag after couple of days. Modern file systems are much more "intelligent" knowing where to store the data more intelligent.
I defrag my partitions occasionally - works good enough for me without havin' that feeling of a slow system after couple of days/weeks. And in case you want defrag just use the Windows built-in defragmenter...

Brgds, Torsten

I use Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier and I'm very happy with it. Its like a defrag plus MS Bootvis.

Sepehr

meshua wrote:If you use NTFS or any other modern file system there is no need to defrag your HDD on a regular basis. And in case you want defrag just use the Windows built-in defragmenter...

I have quite the opposite opinion on this, as I notice a big difference in system performance after a defrag. These many years I have been relying on XP's built-in defrag which truly took about 10 minutes. Recently I purchased PerfectDisk 8 and my first defrag with that program took over .5 hour and my machine runs better than ever. I defrag once a week and must say that the subsequent defrags with PerfectDisk are quicker, but just as effective.

In my opinion, defragging should be proportional to the use of your hard drive. With normal use, no need to defrag a NTFS drive more than once a month. Defragging is more disk usage on the way to the eventual failure of the drive. No need to add unnecessary wear and tear.
On the other hand, after 8-10 hours of video editing and rendering, my "work" or "scratch" drive is quite shamblized from the large video files being moved to and fro on the disc. It needs to be defragged before the next work session while my boot drive, which only has the software and OS on it, can go months without a defrag because hardly any files have been added or moved.
The Windows defragger works OK in most cases. Recently, I started using PerfectDisk 8, which for $20 was a pretty darn good deal, and I like it a little better. You have more control over how your drives are defragmented and you can defragment individual files which comes in handy for large video and PDF files to make a cleaner file for a better final result.

ronbo613 wrote:In my opinion, defragging should be proportional to the use of your hard drive. With normal use, no need to defrag a NTFS drive more than once a month.

Also depends on how full your disk is. The less free space there is, the more quickly you will start getting file and free space fragmentation.

That brings up another benefit of PerfectDisk 8; the ability to defrag a disk that is nearly full, something the Windows defragger won't do.

ronbo613 wrote:That brings up another benefit of PerfectDisk 8; the ability to defrag a disk that is nearly full, something the Windows defragger won't do.

Of course, there is a reason for that, and trying to defragment a full drive will be unpleasant regardless.

jjesusfreak01 wrote:

ronbo613 wrote:That brings up another benefit of PerfectDisk 8; the ability to defrag a disk that is nearly full, something the Windows defragger won't do.

Of course, there is a reason for that, and trying to defragment a full drive will be unpleasant regardless.

Running with a full and badly fragmented drive would be even more unpleasant!

NTFS file system most certainly needs to be defraged just as often as Fat.

Moreover, there are NO ill effects on the Hard Drive when setting your Defrag program to run all the time in the background. To the contrery, it's better for the drive to defrag lightly fraged drive than to wait a month and have to program run for two hours............

With this said, Diskeeper is by far the best on the market. As a mater of fact, the defrag program built into all versions of Windows is a very light version of diskeeper. It does NO look like Diskeeper in any way, but has some of its most basic features.

If it were my money, Diskeeper Pro is the way to go..........

Best to all and a Happy New Year............

Truthfinder

Truthfinder wrote:NTFS file system most certainly needs to be defraged just as often as Fat.

Due architecture NTFS is less affected by fragmentation than FAT. That means you have to defrag it after certain time but not that often that FAT. The most frequently space that might be a potential target for fragmentation is the MFT (Master File table) of NTFS. So the developers add some "breathing room"[1] around the MFT to keep fragmentation down. That covers my own experiences I've made with NTFS and FAT16/32. Finally Fragmentation is not a closed file at all but with NTFS you can face them with less concerns.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archiv ... x?mfr=true

Brgds, Torsten

tomh009 wrote:Running with a full and badly fragmented drive would be even more unpleasant!

I have a 250G drive that I use for storage, it is not defragmented that often, but the Windows defragger goes by a percentage of the drive space remaining, in this case, there is 10.6G of free space, so it is not full by any means. Perfect Disk 8 just seems more efficient.