Whats the best defragger

[DJMONDY]

I would like to know what is the best windows defragger to have or is windows defrag the best?

I find windows defrag very slow. Is this normal?
Ive got a 160gb hd.

Cheers :)

[saturnotaku]

If you have a lot of data on that drive, yes it's going to be slow. I use Raxco Perfect Disk myself, but Executive Software Diskeeper works well also. The latter may be better in your case because you can set it to defragment when your system is idle.

[Clay]

Well NTFS partitions supposedly don't need defragging but I've always liked O&O Defragger: http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/pro.html

[Daneel Olivaw]

Personnaly I defrag files that are big (over 100MB) and heavily fragmented (over 1000 parts) manually by moving them to another partition and back.

The more free space you have on your HD (over 40%), the faster it'll defrag. So move those big torrent vid files off your c:, defrag c:, then move 'em back.

[Rytr]

Clay put me on to O&O and it is about the best that I have used.

[zer0]

perfect disk 7.0 for me... :)

[Danhill]

Hmm I use the Norton System works (2003), maybe there is better programs for that than Nortons speed disc??

[DJMONDY]

No one seems to be using windows defrag so i assume its not that good!

I really would like a defrag thats working in the backround without taking up to much system power so i dont have to defrag each month.

Cheers guys :)

[saturnotaku]

I tried O&O last night. It's extremely fast, but it's a system hog compared to Perfect Disk or Diskeeper.

[Clay]

I tried O&O last night. It's extremely fast, but it's a system hog compared to Perfect Disk or Diskeeper.
O&O also has a TSR that hangs around which I'm not too crazy about. I'll check out Perfect Disk or Diskeeper again, been a while since I've used those.

[$n][pErMan]

No one seems to be using windows defrag so i assume its not that good!
I use it all the time.... I have no issues with it. Works fine. :)

[saturnotaku]

I went back to Perfect Disk. It does the job perfectly well and takes up less than 4 mb of resources compared to ~9 for Diskeeper and more than 13 for O&O.

[Rakeesh]

Well NTFS partitions supposedly don't need defragging but I've always liked O&O Defragger: http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/pro.html

I've never heard that before. The only partition types I can think of that by design don't need defragging are ext2 and reiserfs (they also don't waste slack space either.) Windows supports neither of which.

I think a few benchmarks have shown Diskeeper to be the best performer though.

[Clay]

I've never heard that before.I have on occassion. Something about how journaling works within NTFS. But, as you can see, I've always defragged anyway. There are gains to be had, not as much as over FAT but defragging is still a good practice.

[Rakeesh]

I have on occassion. Something about how journaling works within NTFS. But, as you can see, I've always defragged anyway. There are gains to be had, not as much as over FAT but defragging is still a good practice.

Journaling is a redundancy table that enables a complete recovery of unfinished writes in most situations in the case of e.g. a sudden power outage. Journaling eliminates the need for a disk scan and fs fix everytime you uncleanly shutdown your computer.

What determines whether or not you need to defrag is how the data is laid out everytime a write happens. In the case of NTFS and FAT, writes are made to the first available whole "cluster" (the size of which varies dependent on the size of the partition itself) in the partition, and filled in all of the other clusters after that. The clusters between that free cluster and the last cluster needed for the file aren't necessarily free though, so it skips those clusters and begins the next fragment of the file at the next first free available cluster. This is, naturally, where your fragmentation occurs, and it gets worse over time, thus eventually you need to defragment the FS.

Also while on the subject, a file either uses a cluster completely or doesn't use it at all, this is where your wasted disk space comes in, and why you'll see "Size" vs "Size on disk" when looking at file sizes.

Reiserfs and ext2fs on the other hand use what is called an inode table which has its own advantages and disadvantages from the winfs file allocation table. For one, there is a limit of the number of inodes that can be created on the filesystem, which means there is a fixed limit for how many files can actually exist on the filesystem at any given time (and that'll vary dependent on the size of the partition, but usually it's a high enough number to not really matter anyways.) inodes work by pointing to raw sectors on the disk where a file will reside, and through various means they can provide an index on the fly that will show where on the disk is a large enough space to fit a new file without breaking it into fragments (in FAT tables, building this index takes lots of time so it can't be done everytime a write occurs, so they are done more blindly. You can see how long this index takes to build by clicking the analyze button in your defrag software.) The result of this is that there is no wasted space at all, and when fragmentation does occur (which it can) it is so minimal that theres virtually no performance loss whatsoever, and it does not get worse over time either.

I think microsoft may have stated that defragging of ntfs is unnecessary as part of their way to convince enterprise customers that their IIS solutions are better than any unix solution (and disk fragmentation is even more important in enterprise systems than desktop systems due to the heavy disk usage of database software.) That is not the case however, defragging in ntfs is every bit as necessary as fat since the basic file allocation is pretty much the same.

[-=DVS=-]

perfect disk 7.0 for me... :)

Me to , simple and good.

[Clay]

@AlphaWolf_HK: Good stuff. I'm casually familiar with many of the facts you stated there but you provided some good insight.

[Graphicmaniac]

Well i use the one into the Norton System Works the Speed Disk, i like it coz leave me choose wich files and folders put in the slowest part of the disck

I've tryed Diskeeper but i have not find this option. Do somebody know if exist some other program that do it?

What do u guys think of the Norton Speed Disk ?