i'm using perfect disk since version 6.0 until 7.0 and all i can say it is a great defragmenter.. i've read some review about this software and try it and love it.. it can do defraggin job on as low as 5% vs 15% windows built in.. pair it with registry mechanic 5.0 www.pctools.com/registry-mechanic/ you can lower your boot time effectively..
I never defrag, when my HDD gets slow, i get more raptors for mah RAID array When i hit the limit on that, i'll move on to Serial Attached SCSI XD. Actually i'm totally fine with the built in windows XP one.
Diskeeper, we are using the enterprise edition in our labs and its doing such a fantastic defrag job. Advanced features of the latest edition of DK are worth checking out.
I voted for Diskeeper! I use the latest version (Pro 2007) and love it! Defrags my drives quickly, defrags the MFT and is easy to schedule too. In combination with ccleaner, this takes care of my hard drive maintainence.
I still wished these defragmenters would allow at least the option of forcing the paging file to the outermost tracks...
Hmm.. There are sharewares, but not freeware that I know of. The Windows built-in defragmenter generally works well, if slowly.
A decent free defragmenter is Auslogics Disk Defrag. http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php Ignore the incessant plugs trying to sell you other "snake oil" utilities that you don't need. The defragmenter is free to use. I use this one on my Vista installation because the one supplied by Microsoft doesn't even give any feedback or progress anymore. P.S. Yes, it's safe to use. It uses the same Microsoft APIs that other defragmenters use.
My past experience tells me not to use defrag too often, if possible, never use it. I get the impression it actually slows down the speed of windows start up time. Something free ain't always good. I'd rather leave it as it is, but just do periodic spring cleaning up temp and redundant files. (CCleaner?).
It aligns the files and structure on the platters of the disk allowing the read/write head(s) to move less or change platters to read data. Who told you not to run it EDIT: This is an old thread so voted is there anything but PerfectDisk
been using perfectdisk for a while now. If you don't want to purchase it, you can always download and use it for the trial I leave it running on schedule and it defrags my machine once every week. So it's always in a defragged state. all my 320GB x 3 + 500GB of it! LOL! If you always want immediate response time from your machine, remember to also set so that Windows does not turn off your hard disk after a period of inactivity. I however sets it to turn off my HDs after 30 mins to conserve power since I leave my PC on 24/7. I'll just leave with the few seconds of hard disk spinning up when I access an idle hard disk.
Defragging is important. You should at least do it once in a while. Otherwise your files will become really fragmented - forcing the HDD to seek all over the place just to gather the data.
The problem with defragging was for older hard drives I think. Defragging all the time would cause some over-use of the platters and the head, and would cause some strain on it. Meh, I don't know. Defragging used to lag my older PC as well (~2000)
Urm... the hdd platters is going to spin and the head will be swingging anyway whether or you you defrag the hard disk