By Terry Currier
Do you have a lot of free time? Or, rather to be more
precise, how much time do you give up waiting for your hard drive to finish
defragging. I’m sure many of you have started the Microsoft defrag program and
go off to see a movie, shopping or even leave it while you sleep. You keep
putting it off, because it takes so long.
With Diskeeper 8.0 from Executive
Software, doesn’t take up your whole afternoon. It is fast and easy. In fact
using what they call “set it and forget it”, you can set it up to run at a set
time, or day of the week. It can handle drive sizes up to four terabytes.
The point of defragging is to get all your files
together. It helps the computer by taking a shorter time to find all of the files it needs to work with.
The question you’re asking is “How can it be faster?” Well the defrag that
comes with Windows looks at everything, including what you use the most often
and moves them up closer to the front of the drive. The reading and moving up
files takes a long time, a loooong time. Diskkeeper realizes that things don’t
really have to be moved up. It reads/looks only for fragmented files. It tells
you how many there are and the amount of improvement there would be after
defragging those files. If you then tell it to go ahead, it will then
consolidate just those files. To explain why only those files I will cheat and
use their own explanation. “Free space consolidation might be important if you have to
create one gigantic contiguous file, but it has no effect on performance. As a
result, Diskeeper uses
algorithms that achieve the highest speed from your
drive regardless of the arrangement of the free spaces on the drive and on the
screen. And it does so without wasting time on excessive consolidation of free
space. We simply go for the fastest possible file access times and then stop.
Even so, you might ask why we don't continue and rearrange
the files further to get a neat display? The answer is, “Because it takes
computer power to do so.” We long ago decided that it would be wrong to consume
more of your computer's performance than we give back. So Diskeeper defragments
until the disk is in top shape PERFORMANCE-wise and then stops. Any further
work is a waste of your computer resources.”
A step forward you can have it defrag your Master File Table (MFT), which the operating system uses for locating the files. you do that by making changes in the setup so when you do a manual reboot it will defrag the MFT. Doing this can open up larger areas of contiguous free space for new file creation and modification. They do make a recommendation of backing up before doing so. I did it and it took a whole eight minutes. I notice that they have a run CHKDSK box for the user to check. This helps prevent corrupt files from being moved to bad disk sectors. In fact I found out from the Microsoft website they recommend running CHKDSK before using the defrag program.
Diskeeper Home Edition cost about $30 and is for home computers running Windows XP Home Edition or earlier. Diskeeper Professional Edition cost about $50 is for the higher end systems such as XP Professional, 2000, NT, Media Center, and Tablet. For enterprise systems they have the Diskeeper Administrator version.
I myself just do it manually, maybe every fourth day and it only takes a few minutes to do all of my drives. By the way while this is running you can still do other things on the computer. Try that with the operating system defrag. Okay it’s not free but it does give you more free time, and what is that worth to you?
You can check out a 30 trial version at http://www.execsoft.com/
From our March 2004 newsletter
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