TheBigC

Is there anything out there decent for defragmenting hard drives? Using Vista, it takes forever to use the built in one and ties up my computers for hours. Plus it does not display any progress or status bar. I am even open to programs that cost money, as long as they give me some benefit.

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Bamboo

BigC, look back through the last few pages cause we just had a really long thread about defragmenting programs.

Only one I have tried with Vista is
http://www.defraggler.com/

Of course it is kind of hard to judge exactly how well it worked, but ran smoothly. Might search around for a tech review of the program.
It is from the same people that put out the CCleaner. And we all love that program.

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=Sarc=

http://www.diskeeper.com/
I use Diskeeper. You can schedule when it defrags or let it automatically decide when to defrag your drives. It has a setting for low priority so it doesn't disturb your regular tasks. I just set it to defrag my drives weekly during the early hours of the morning.

http://www.disktrix.com/
There's also UltimateDefrag. It moves all your most accessed files to the outer edge of the harddrive for faster access. The first time can be pretty slow since it has to reorganize the files on disk but subsequent defrags are much faster if it doesn't have to move large files to the outer edge.

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TheBigC

I just tried that program. I did a defrag this morning, yet the program you recommended found over 25 gig more of fragmented files. Makes me wonder which one is correct?

I will try the other 2 tonight and see how they work!!

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Reaperassault

Defraggler is good stuff, it gets my vote

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msdz

DiskTrix UltimateDefrag 2008 gets my vote but I also like Raxco's PerfectDisk. Either of them are good, I let PerfectDisk work on my O/S hard drive while I use UltimateDefrag 2008 for organizing the files on my gaming hard drive, I can place the files in the fastest position on the hard drive in the order I want. It really improves the games load times for maps.

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ScratchMonkey

I was just reading the column in the newspaper for PC help and the writer mentioned that Mac's don't have this problem, that OSX somehow has a better allocation strategy that largely eliminates the need for defragmentation. Plus, it has no registry so there's no reason for "registery cleaners", either. (I've never owned a Mac, so can't confirm.)

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Steamers

Raxco Perfectdisk, it can perform offline defragmenting (What that means is that it can defragment the system files)
Close thread XD

Apophis

Keep in mind that OSX is BSD with a pretty Apple GUI on top of it.

I don't ever need to defrag my RHEL boxes either.

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ScratchMonkey

On OS X (HFS+) defragmentation:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?...70301091515843
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#Anchor-31774

Some interesting information on allocation strategies and their effects.

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draeh

For a PC with XP/Vista its PerfectDisk FTW!

I've been using it without incidence for over 3 years now.

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Bisclaveret

From what i've heard, you can't completely ELIMINATE fragmentation, no matter how perfectly your disk allocation is. That is, unless you want to bog down your drive writes to once per revolution or so, killing all performance. Even filesystems like ext3 on linux are prone to fragmentation (theres even a listing for it under filesystem stats, i had my computer running linux for about 2 months and got about 1.5% fragmentation) no matter how much the people like to pimp that ancient FS. The key is it doesn't suffer AS MUCH as FAT or NTFS.

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Bamboo

New article just posted yesterday

UltimateDefrag Moves Apps and Files for Quicker Access
http://lifehacker.com/392933/ultimat...quicker-access

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Bernout

I haven't tried it yet but another free application you could play with is at:

http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag

Bernout

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msdz

They make it sound like UltimateDefrag is free to use in that article Bamboo but it is only a 14 day trial. Also, a lot of people don't understand that if using a single hard drive and you try placing the games on the outer edge(fastest) of the hard drive you will slow the computer down. Windows files that get accessed the most should be placed there for the best performance then the game files after it. Running a second hard drive and placing the game data on the fastest part of the drive will make the games load a lot faster.
If using UltimateDefrag on the O/S hard drive make sure Windows is placed on the outer edge of the hard drive.
I have used UltimateDefrag for my O/S hard drive but found out that Raxco PerfectDisk seems to make it run faster. May be my imagination though. that is the reason why I use both defrag programs, plus PerfectDisk does the offline defrag, defragging important system files it normally would not do while Windows is running.

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