Which defrag?

"jt" wrote:

New user of XP home w/ sp2. Is the native defrag adequate or should I get a
better one? Which is better, O&O pro or PerfectDisk?

That depends on why you think that the third party solutions are better than
the native defrag. In my mind, there are only three serious contenders for
this function: the native defragger, PerfectDisk, or Diskeeper. But which
one of these three is the best solution depends pretty much on what you need.


The native defragger will defrag your drive, but you have to do it manually
and you can only defrag one drive at a time. Also, it won't defrag your
pagefile, although the pagefile rarely should become fragmented anyway and if
it does, there is an easy workaround to get it defragmented again by other
means.

Diskeeper is the full-featured version of the built-in defragger (which
itself is licensed from the same software company that makes Diskeeper).
Diskeeper can defragment the page file, but much more important, it can also
defragment automatically in the background on a schedule, and it can even
determine automatically (without your intervention) how often it should
actually defragment (anywhere from one hour to one week, depending on how
quickly your drive tends to refragment between sessions). It calls this
feature "set it and forget it," which is exactly what it enables you to do.

PerfectDisk uses a totally different defragmentation strategy from the
built-in defragger or Diskeeper. It focuses on placing files so that the
least modified files are placed at the beginning of the disk. It also
focuses much more heavily on free space consolidation. Raxco, the maker of
PerfectDisk, claims that this approach results in faster subsequent
fragmentation runs and less fragmentation of newly created files.
PerfectDisk defrags can be scheduled to run in the background, but unlike
Diskeeper you must set the schedule manually.

I have extensively used all three, and in terms of overall performance I
cannot notice any transparent difference in how quickly they read and write
files on the hard drive (which is the purpose of defragmentation in the first
place). The biggest difference is that I have to run the built-in defragger
manually, while the other two can be scheduled to run automatically. Of the
three, only Diskeeper provides a method for measuring any performance gains
you might get after a defrag, but that's different from saying that the gains
you will get will be any greater than the ones you would get with the other
two programs. It does seem, however, that a drive defragmented with
PerfectDisk refragments at a slightly slower rate than the other two programs
-- but Diskeeper will usually defragment it sooner.

In the end, here is what I would suggest, although I won't get into the
technical reasons. If you have a new computer with lots of RAM and you don't
reboot it every day (e.g. you constantly leave it on, or you merely log out
but without rebooting the computer), you are probably best off using the
built-in defragger. If neither applies to you, you don't want even a little
defragmentation, and you don't want to mess with when or how often you should
defragment, use Diskeeper with "set it and forget it" enabled. If you want
to be slightly more proactive and also if free space consolidation is
especially important to you (e.g. you don't have a huge hard drive, or you
have lots of large files such as images and multimedia, then PerfectDisk may
be your best bet.

Ken