Good defragmenter

[DavidDLC]

Guys, please recommend a good HDD defragmenter, I have used the Windows built-in only, but I'm pretty sure there are better freeware outthere.

David.

[NiHaoMike]

That's just fine for a regular HDD. Don't defrag SSDs as that does no good.

[grumpydoc]

NTFS file systems shouldn't really need defragmenting

I suppose you could do worse than this GPLed one.

[Zbig]

If that's a system drive, upgrade to SSD. If that's not a system drive - fragmentation shouldn't really matter much anyway.

Here's my subjectively  perceived drive performance:

Fragmented HDD
Non-fragmented HDD
|
|
|
|
|5 light years (not to scale)
|
|
|
|
SSD

[mariush]

I prefer O&O Defrag, it's excellent (but shareware, 30 day trial available).

SSDs don't need defragmenting

[G7PSK]

I use auslogics disk defrag.

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

The best one I know of. Another Australian product based in Sydney.

[Galaxyrise]

I used Diskeeper back before I had SSDs.  (It's not free, though.) It made a pretty big difference on disks with a lot of file churn. 

[Fagear]

I really like MyDefrag (old name JkDefrag).

It has scenarios for system or data disks, different speed/quality ratios.
Visualizes processes within Win9x style.
Can be set as screensaver.
Uses native Windows API, so it is safe to use.

[free_electron]

Diskeeper is the gold standard.


a cheapo way to defrag is by copying entire directories , deleting the original then renaming the 'copy of'.

quasi static data never gets fragmented. only files that at altered are being fragmented.
so any program file , etc never fragments. it;s ony user data that gets fragmented.

by making  copy a new file is created that most likely is going to be continuous in nature. then throw away the old fragmented files.

[Rerouter]

It can only process files under a certain size,

Heres 1 vote to "MyDefrag" the monthly option really shows on older computers, and you can leave it on screen and kids can be distracted for hours.

[digsys]

For W/Stations, I've always used TuneUp Utilities. An excellent set of tools.
For servers, I use Defraggler. It's NEVER had a glitch with W200, 2003 or 2008. Real nice code

[marshallh]

Defraggler works great here. First full defrag will take about a day.

They also produce CCleaner which on new systems removes an astouding amount of juunk and crap.

[nctnico]

Diskeeper is the gold standard.

I quit using it when I got aware the Scientology Church is involved with Diskeeper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condusiv_Technologies). The software works well but at some point you have to do what is right.

[Stonent]

For W/Stations, I've always used TuneUp Utilities. An excellent set of tools.
For servers, I use Defraggler. It's NEVER had a glitch with W200, 2003 or 2008. Real nice code

Another one for Defraggler.

[SeanB]

Sysinternals has a very good registry defragmenter, which does a lot more than the disk one as it gets the registry heap into single contiguous files. Much better than anything else as the registry is the most used and written to and gets fragmented a lot. GIYF to find it.

[kc9qvl]

Free open source.
http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

[justanothercanuck]

I used to use Norton Disk Speed on W2K and XP, unfortunately it doesn't work on newer versions of windows, and they never made an updated version.  You could use it to map certain directories to certain portions of your drive...  What I used to do was set the boot files to the beginning, followed by system32, program files, the rest of the windows directory, documents and settings, and lastly your swap/hibernation files.  Used to make things pretty fast that way, compared to a default windows defrag.

[apelly]

I'm pretty sure Windows XP and later provide an API for this. Further, I believe that all modern defraggers simply use the API. Therefore, no benefit to changing. You might want certain stuff on the edge of the platters, but again, I'm pretty sure Windows tries to do this for you anyway.

[mariush]

I used to use Norton Disk Speed on W2K and XP, unfortunately it doesn't work on newer versions of windows, and they never made an updated version.  You could use it to map certain directories to certain portions of your drive...  What I used to do was set the boot files to the beginning, followed by system32, program files, the rest of the windows directory, documents and settings, and lastly your swap/hibernation files.  Used to make things pretty fast that way, compared to a default windows defrag.

You can do that in O&O Defrag I mentioned at the start of this thread.

[DavidDLC]

I used DiskDefrag, took way longer time than the Windows defrag, I like that it has a graphic interface.

My computer started to get slow after the upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, so I'm looking for methods to get it faster.

I usually buy the Windows OEM installer, that is what I did with Windows 8, format the HDD and install a fresh copy of the OS, I have been doing this for long time with excellent results. My problem is that the Windows 8.1 OED installer is not yet available.

David.

[NiHaoMike]

Back when I set up a Windows VM, there was an app called nLite or something for XP that automatically streamlined it. Maybe there's something similar for 8 and 8.1.

[Mechatrommer]

I used to use Norton Disk Speed on W2K and XP, unfortunately it doesn't work on newer versions of windows, and they never made an updated version.

good to know someone mentioned this. i'm still using XP but Norton Speed Disk is long gone bye bye. it was fun using it back then, but when HDD size become larger and larger, it didnt cut it anymore. the cost of waiting the completion of significantly fragmented HDD is overwhelming the productivity of just using the fragmented disk and produce something more usefull and fun. a direct copy HDD->HDD is much more practical nowadays imho. the problem with built in Windows Defragmenter is that its so darn slow, the UI is so poor that we would not know when it will be completed, its like eternity, even in the old days (when Norton is a much fun to use).

I'm pretty sure Windows XP and later provide an API for this.

yeah i guess its like (1) read a chunk of data from disk into memory (2) write the chunk into disk free temp space for safety in case of power failure (3) write the chunk into new appropriate location (4) delete the previously read chunk (5) delete the temp chunk. in short its called, disk chunk swap or relocation (with many call of API). good luck bypassing API in Windows.

+1 to SSD i hope i wont forget when i go for the next shopping.

[BravoV]

... i'm still using XP ....

+1 to SSD i hope i wont forget when i go for the next shopping.

Windows XP will shorten your SSD's life since it does not support TRIM natively.

Either jump ship to Linux or migrate to Win 7 (minimum).

Edit :
Or straight bare metal Linux + virtual machine running XP and still as the main platform, if you still can not let XP go.   

[Mechatrommer]

Windows XP will shorten your SSD's life since it does not support TRIM natively.

thanx for notifying, but shorten by how much? last night i window shopped online to find out time between failure for SSD is 200 years (assuming 24/7 operation). with HDD i only can confidently say service life of 5-10 years "practically" of my daily life, forget whats written on paper. if its shorten by 50% hence 100 years, then its good enough! i dont have enough lifetime to witness the event even alot better than few HDD crashes that i've experienced before.

Or straight bare metal Linux + virtual machine running XP and still as the main platform, if you still can not let XP go.   

and for what goodness it is if all my softwares and drivers are running and accepted in XP? just to satify TRIM support? i fell being left with XP+HDD is much more heart soothing or maybe i can deal with upgrade to Win7 (not Win8) and let go some of little nice XP features that are crippled in Win7.

[BravoV]

Not a SSD expert, but I pretty sure the TRIM specification is made for a good reason.

Its your money and your decision. 

i fell being left with XP+HDD is much more heart soothing

Hmm... what a coincidence, I have a friend that is exactly like you, but still love to use DOS, maybe I should introduce him to you, so you can convince him to move to Win XP maybe ? 

[Mechatrommer]

I have a friend that is exactly like you, but still love to use DOS, maybe I should introduce him to you, so you can convince him to move to Win XP maybe ? 

good to know. but i'm sure i'm pretty advanced than him i used DOS only occasionally (in VM or "emulated" in XP so to speak) but now it has very limited use for me. not to mention that i already have "little" experience to work with Win Vista, 7 and 8 ironically Win8 opted to continue supporting "VM DOS" and crippled even further the more useful things such as "file search by date/size" and device manager access

[apelly]

Windows XP will shorten your SSD's life since it does not support TRIM natively.

Using your SSD will shorten it's life. Just like your trusty potato peeler. You will be dead before your SSD has run out of wear levelling options and you're down to so little space that you need a new one.

Buy an SSD. Thrash the hell out of it. Enjoy the speed. In three years get the upgrade you want. Thrash the hell out of it. Give the old one to your poor mate/uncle/granny/cousin. Rinse, repeat.

[Mechatrommer]

Not a SSD expert, but I pretty sure the TRIM specification is made for a good reason.

from reading the wiki its inevitable since flash memory works differently with magnetic disk. if i read correctly, "already written" flash cannot be simply overwritten with new data right away, it has to go through "delete existing data -> write new data" process, so thats why trim is there. i believe the "committe" has made a good job to make SATAIII back compatible to SATAI (my MB only supprt SATAI i believe) except this TRIM extension. thanks there is TRIM command software for unsupporting OS. even better since i can make manual trim command whereever i like since once the trim is submitted, data cannot be undeleted (which i usually do). whats most appealling about SSD since first i heard it is it doesnt have adverse gyroscoping effect as HDD does (which will shorten the lifetime ofcourse!) so you can throw your laptop while turned ON to the sky tumbling without worry provided you catch it before the ground

[grumpydoc]

I'm pretty sure Windows XP and later provide an API for this. Further, I believe that all modern defraggers simply use the API. Therefore, no benefit to changing. You might want certain stuff on the edge of the platters, but again, I'm pretty sure Windows tries to do this for you anyway.

The API IIRC is fairly low level - move block at position A to position B - so the choice of what block to put where depends on the defragmenter.

Windows XP will shorten your SSD's life since it does not support TRIM natively.

Lack of TRIM won't shorten the disk life by much, wear levelling will still work without it but the disk won't know that data in erased files is no longer needed, so It will keep shuffling the data around on writes. Remember that the disk "erase block" is much larger than the filesystem block size so writing, say, 4k on a device with a 64k erase block size is actually read-modify-write and will cause the block to shift.

If the device knows that the block was empty to start with it can avoid the read-modify-write cycle and just do the write.

So TRIM is more of a performance thing, rather than device life thing.

[Bloch]

My favorite  Auslogics Disk Defrag Free

[FoXX]

I also use this:

My favorite  Auslogics Disk Defrag Free