Fast And Efficient Disk Defragmentation
Bruce Von Stiers
Does your computer run a little bit sluggishly? Does it take a while to access a file or to save it? Part of your problem may be that your hard drive is severely fragmented.
As I understand it, when a computer’s operating system saves a file it doesn’t necessarily save as a whole file in one specific location. Pieces of the file can be scattered throughout the hard drive. Why operating systems do this I haven’t a clue. But I do know that it can cause problems. Even big problems sometimes.
That is where a nifty program from Diskeeper comes in. The program is Diskeeper 2010. It is the premiere hard drive defragmentation program on the market. There are actually several versions of the program available, depending on your needs. There is a home edition, a home server edition, two professional level editions, one for servers, and another for enterprise servers and an administration edition. Like I said, there are different versions for different needs.
The version of the program I checked out was the Professional edition. That version comes with features like Intelliwrite and Invisitasking. There is another feature called the Titan Defrag Engine that is available on the Enterprise edition . Intelliwrite allows a file to be written faster and helps keep the fragmenting footprint to a minimum. It is supposed to be able to curb fragmentation by up to 85%. Invisitasking takes any residual fragmenting away from the operating system and does things in the background so that system resources aren’t eaten up while defragmenting a hard drive.
Along with those features are the Terabyte Volume Engine and several other smaller defrag engines. There is an engine called I-FAAST. With this engine you can gain extra performance from the hard drive. This is done by benchmarking the drive volumes and determining the fastest performing sections. You are supposed to be able to get up to 80% better performance from a hard drive using this technology. And as this feature is integrated with Ivisitasking, it all happens in the background.
To test out Diskeeper 2010, I used my Dell Inspiron 1720 notebook computer. I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve had the computer for over three years and before the test had never defragmented the hard drive. I had been finding a significant lag in program and file loading times. I hoped that by defragmenting the hard drive with the program that some, or all of my lag time problems would disappear.
The program installed easily and soon I was up and running. I knew right from the start that the defragmentation process would take a while. So I first had the program analyze the hard drive for fragmentation. I found that the drive was even more fragmented than I had thought. So I initiated the defragmentation process and went off to do something else.
The defragmentation process began a bit before 9:00 at night. Over two hours later, the defragmentation was only 64% completed. I then decided to go on to bed and get the results in the morning. Well, apparently, the process was halted a bit after I left the machine. It seems the computer went to its default password screen, somehow halting the process. But after I put in my password and the program’s user interface was shown again, the process continued where it left off. About 40 minutes later it was complete. I now had a mostly defragmented hard drive. There were still a few hangers on that the program either couldn’t access or was unable to defragment.
To back up a minute, I probably need to tell you of the hard drive capacity and how much I’ve got used up. It is a 300GB drive. There are almost 250,000 files that use up over half the drive. So, as I said earlier, I knew that this would be a daunting task to defragment the drive.
As the defragmentation process was going on, I was able to monitor the progress via status listings in one of the user interface windows. The program found 248,737 files on the drive. And with that, there were 3,545 fragmented files that were identified and examined. There was a stat of 9,334 files examined by way of Contiguous File Examination. And after it was all said and done, the program let me know that there were 717 files that it couldn’t do anything with.
And after everything was finished I was able to view a volume map showing the high performing files, low performing files and any open spaces available on the drive. I then thought about dumping a whole bunch of stuff off the drive. How could I have used up that much space? But as this is such a daunting task, I think I’ll wait for a bit.
With hard drives getting larger by the day and users filling them up, there needs to be a faster more efficient way to defragment those drives. Diskeeper is probably the most efficient and cost effective solution available. It is easy to install and easy to use. A good portion of the program’s features run in the background so you don’t even know they are there working.
I mentioned Diskeeper being affordable. The home edition is only $ 39.95 US. The one I checked out, the professional edition is only $20 higher. The pricing scale moves up for server and enterprise editions but top out at $ 649.95.
To learn more about Diskeeper 2010, visit www.diskeeper.com.
© 2010 Bruce E. Von Stiers