Best defragging utilities?

[clarkbark]

I have to say I really like Diskeeper 10. Plus diskeeper 10 isn't really a 3rd party program considering the defragmenter that comes standard in windows xp IS diskeeper 3 (its an old version). Diskeeper 10 has many new improvemnts since 3

 

[SuperFly03]

When I said that, I just meant the normal residential edition because I am failry sure most ppl don't want to fork over more money just because their hard drive is bigger than executive software thinks they should have.

I had something else to say........ damn it lol.

Bah, nevermind, if i think of it ill edit my post

 

[bobwya]

Hi

I have no hidden agenda and can truely say that PerfectDisk is far superior to Diskeeper... I run a system with about 12x 250Gbyte(+) (lose track these days 🙂 harddisks (unraided)... Diskeeper 9.0 wouldn't even touch half of them because it said they were too full to defragment!! Of the ones it would process it was bloody slow... PerfectDisk zips through the big drives by comparision and appears to work even down to 1% free drive space!!

Have they sorted out it whether Diskeeper can defrag full partitions/volumes yet in version 10.0 (sorry guys but I've only tried up to version 9.0)...?? If not remains an unviable option (even if they have sorted out the speed issues).

So in my (unbiased) opinion what is the use of defragmentation software that won't defragment partitions that are >90% (or was it >80%) full??!! This is when they are most vulnerable to the effects of slow-down through file fragmentation!!

PerfectDisk can get a system volume down to ~0% fragmentation but you would have to go into process explorer (or task manager if you are old-fashioned) and kill off all none essential processes to free file locks.
It gives a report listing all the fragmented files and the number of fragments in these files after a defragmentation run on a drive...

So in summary either get PerfectDisk (version 6.0 or 7.0 are great in my opinion) or start using Linux or a Linux-based NAS... 🙂

Bob Wya

 

[SuperFly03]

Dear god man wtf do you put on 12+ hard drives? Geez lol.

 

[Fuse]

O&O defrag

How am I only the second person to mention O&O Defrag?

It's fast and offers 5 different defrag methods. I do not know it's size limitations, but I work with 4 80gb drive anyways.

Not saying it's the best because I haven't used Diskeeper - mainly because I have no need to with O&O. If I'm missing something with O&O, please let me know.

 

[Randy77]

I'm surprised linux_0 hasn't popped in here yet since Linux doesn't need you to defrag your drives.

Oh yah...Diskeeper works well. I too didn't know about the 500GB limit though.

As far as I know, there is still a 500GB limit. I don't have any partitions larger than 400GB so it works fine for me.

As far as Linux goes... I wish there WAS a defrag. I don't think it's possible to keep a disc running at 100% without it. I remember when Windows 2K came out and MS said something about 'Defrag isn't needed any more'. It reminds me of the time many years ago when Bill Gates said that no PC will ever need more than 640K. Of course, this was way before Windows.

 

[Randy77]

sorry this might not be the answer you are looking for...

but the best defrag is always:

Complete Backup, Format, Complete Restore.

It takes time to do and if not done properly with professional tools u might just destroy all your data but the fragmentation is 0% after doing it this way

I guess that depends on what is doing the restoring. Whenever I've done this with Windows, I know that I need to run windows defrag when I'm done, or the drive looks horrible. I don't know why. I just know that this is the way Windows seems to like it. *shrug*

 

[mitch074]

Why Linux filesystems don't need defragmenting: every time a file is written, the system looks for an array of blocks that is long enough to store the file in one go. Only if it can't find this contiguous free space, it will split the file. On top of that, you usually have, like, 10% of the partition free space hidden from users (only root can see it) - meaning that the system will never let you fill a disk. Accidentally, this also means that there is always much more free space to allocate than you'd think, so there is always a great chance of never having a file too big to be written in one go.

Fragmented files will be put back in one piece the next time they are changed and rewritten to disk - provided there is enough room to hold them in one piece.

I think there are some other measures in place limiting fragmentation, but there you have it: a Linux file system doesn't need defragmenting because it doesn't fragment files first.

However, fragmentation do happen: it's just that the impact on performance isn't as big in Linux than it is in Windows, due to the filesystems not needing a centralised FAT - so there is less back and forth movements needed by the HD's head, making fragmentation much less of a drag.

 

[SuperFly03]

I'm surprised linux_0 hasn't popped in here yet since Linux doesn't need you to defrag your drives.

Oh yah...Diskeeper works well. I too didn't know about the 500GB limit though.

As far as I know, there is still a 500GB limit. I don't have any partitions larger than 400GB so it works fine for me.

As far as Linux goes... I wish there WAS a defrag. I don't think it's possible to keep a disc running at 100% without it. I remember when Windows 2K came out and MS said something about 'Defrag isn't needed any more'. It reminds me of the time many years ago when Bill Gates said that no PC will ever need more than 640K. Of course, this was way before Windows.

If you read back a page or 2, the 500GB limit has been indexed to 768GB I think it said. However this is still a problem if you stripe 500GB or even 2 400GB, either point is there is a size limitation on Diskkeeper.

 

[linux_0]

I'm surprised linux_0 hasn't popped in here yet since Linux doesn't need you to defrag your drives.

Oh yah...Diskeeper works well. I too didn't know about the 500GB limit though.

As far as I know, there is still a 500GB limit. I don't have any partitions larger than 400GB so it works fine for me.

As far as Linux goes... I wish there WAS a defrag. I don't think it's possible to keep a disc running at 100% without it. I remember when Windows 2K came out and MS said something about 'Defrag isn't needed any more'. It reminds me of the time many years ago when Bill Gates said that no PC will ever need more than 640K. Of course, this was way before Windows.


There is an ext2 defrag but you really do not need it.

ext2 and ext3 work fine without it.

The way ext2 and ext3 are designed there is virtually no fragmentation.

There is no ext3 defragmentation tool. An offline ext2 defragmenter, e2defrag, exists but requires that the ext3 filesystem be converted back to ext2 first. However, defragmentation has long been considered a non-issue for ext2/ext3, since they are much better at placing files on the disk versus old FAT-based filesystems.

 

[kittle]

Anyone know which of these degrag programs will run on win2k server WITHOUT requiring me to buy the expensive server edition?