Disk Defrag

[schmidthouse]

I'm looking for an 'effective' Disk Defragmentation program.
Economical but effective.
Thought I'd solicit some opinions. My Hard Drive is getting older and the easier to access files the better. I've been using "Diskeeper" but not fully satisfied
Any experiences or suggestions appreciated.
Thanks

[iroc9555]

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/

Pretty cool.

[DavidR]

Well the first thing that I would suggest is being strict with the amount of junk on the system.

Be critical of what programs you have on the system do you actually need them, is there any redundancy, e.g. programs that do very similar if not the same task (choose the one most regularly used).

Regularly clear temp files and browser cache, etc.

Keep control over the amount of hard disk space used by system restore. I have seen the System Volume Information folder/s grow to in excess of 1.5GB. All of the above contribute to overall fragmentation, so keeping a grip on those will also help.

I Use Puran Defrag, it does a very good job, is pretty fast and it also has a boot-time defrag option, http://www.puransoftware.com/.

[Charyb]

David, are you using Puran on both XP and W7?

There is also Piriform Defraggler. Same developer as ccleaner.

http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

I believe all 3 mentioned above have a free version so this covers the economical portion of your question.

[schmidthouse]

Thanks guys.
Appreciate the input/feedback.
Yes David, keeping things simple and clean on the Hard Drive is something I've always tried to achieve; but over time the Hard Drive does get tired.
 I have heard good things awhile back about "Puran." 

[Tech]

I use Puran on both Windows 7 and the virtual machines with XP.

[schmidthouse]

I use Puran on both Windows 7 and the virtual machines with XP.

Thanks Tech.

[craigb]

Puran is good but i prefer Defraggler as it keeps the default windows file placement but it's faster and more thorough than the default windows defragmenter, Defraggler also has boot defrag and disk health information.

[SpeedyPC]

I use Puran on both Windows 7 and the virtual machines with XP.

+1 I use it too

[Asyn]

Puran is good but i prefer Defraggler...

+1

[DavidR]

David, are you using Puran on both XP and W7?
<snip>

Yes I use it on both and it works perfectly on both.

[DavidR]

Puran is good but i prefer Defraggler as it keeps the default windows file placement but it's faster and more thorough than the default windows defragmenter, Defraggler also has boot defrag and disk health information.

By leaving the default windows file placement, will make it faster as it won't be moving them and I don't know how efficient that might be, Puran also does hard disk optimisation, in that files/applications, etc. are placed at the faster locations on the disk.

So the windows file placement is usually based on the prefetch information and Puran essently does that and more I believe. This makes it harder to directly compare speed, but you don't have to enable the Optimisation features or other performance features, which would speed it up.

[craigb]

The main reason i stick to the default file placement is due to an artical Essexboy posted here a while ago about the boot time speedup process and that once you completed this process the default file placement had to be retained by only using the default windows defrag or a defragmenter that used the same windows placement such as Defraggler.

I found Puran and Defraggler to be about the same in performance, both much faster than the default one, never noticed any benifits in using Purans disk optimisation but then again my hard drives have never gotten to such a bad state that i would notice any difference probably.

[DavidR]

Well on my old XP Pro system I still get a boot in around a minute.

I have had pre-fetch set to "2" prefetch only boot files. I guess where the default file placement would also be recorded in the prefetch folder that is meant to speed boot; so essentially it wouldn't matter very much where the files were if the location is recorded in prefetch.

[schmidthouse]

Appreciate the good info.
Yes Craig, I have read some 'Defraggler' reviews.
I guess with something like a Hard Disk Defrag program, it's an area where trying a number of different programs would not do a Hard Drive any good....one moving it here and another moving it there.
One, I think has to rely pretty much on opinion. No??
I'd bet the process used by "Diskeeper" by Condusiv Technologies (my present defrag program) may not be the same as the programs mentioned here.
Decisions, decisions.