Recommended Defragmentation Tool for Vista

[Breeder]

Can anyone please recommend their preference for defragmentation software and why they prefer it over the others.

Many thanks!

[Sputnik]

JK Defrag - It works and its free or Raxco Perfect disk but, you have to pay for that.

[Agent]

O&O Defrag has always served me well and has won a fair few awards.

[DIGITALrain™]

Never used a free defragger, tho I'd try the best free defragger first....

JkDefrag..... "JkDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64. Completely automatic and very easy to use, fast, low overhead, with several optimization strategies, and can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows......"

....and....

JkDefragGUI [may not need this]
"....a Graphical User Interface which allows you to easily select all the features JkDefrag, a freeware defragmentation tool made by Jeroen Kessels has to offer".



....these below aren't exactly free, but there two of the best....

Diskeeper 2008 Pro .....used this one for an age .....flawless, stable, quite fast defrag (after 1st run).... worked great for me.

Perfectdisk 2008 .....currently testing / using this one ...seems very good also.

[TheReaFireblade]

Auslogics Disk Defrag is another free defragger, which is Vista compatible (32bit and 64bit)

[this_is_gav]

Another JKDefrag vote. JKDefragGUI isn't needed - it's a separate front-end which downloads the latest JKDefrag and then allows you to set options for it via a GUI rather than through a command line. The standard JKDefrag has got a GUI, but no configurable options through it - any options you want set need to be done through the command line.

Get JKDefragGUI. The default options are fine, but it lets you set an option if you do want to. No needless background services, no silly startup processes. It's just a defragger.

[Lourdes]

Another in favour of JKDefragGUI - it's very good, works quickly and does a good job. To think I used to pay for PerfectDisk..

[dangel]

I've been trying Paragon Defrag 2009 - it runs from a boot CD in a Windows PE environment and sees my RAID drives (and can load drivers). Because it's offiline it can fully defrag Vista (page file, volume shadow copy etc) which is rather nice.

[kalniel]

JKDefrag

Even the default run (just double clicking on the exe) is very effective, quick and easy to use, with good visualisation of what it's doing and no background tasks/services that hang around.

Though I also love the ability to customise and control lots of different aspects, such as different sorting routines, from the commandline, so I've set up a couple of different shortcuts on the desktop that do different things (eg. Daily C:, Weekly all drives). If you want to automate it you can then call these from the default windows scheduler.

[this_is_gav]

I've been trying Paragon Defrag 2009 - it runs from a boot CD in a Windows PE environment and sees my RAID drives (and can load drivers). Because it's offiline it can fully defrag Vista (page file, volume shadow copy etc) which is rather nice.

Yeah, I've got JKDefrag on a custom PE disk myself for that reason.

[DiskeeperRep]

Hi,
I noticed that DigitalRain above mentioned Diskeeper 2008, so I'll just make a quick comment about defragmenting Vista with DK.

When using Diskeeper on Vista volumes that have the Volume Shadowcopy Service (VSS) enabled, it is recommended that the special VSS-compatible defragmentation mode of Diskeeper be used to minimize file movement and consequently shadow copy activity. This is a limitation of the way VSS behaves on Vista volumes formatted with cluster size less than 16K, and applies to -all- defragmenters, not just DK.

Please see this article for more information .
EDIT: It appears that I am not permitted to post links. So please google for "Diskeeper Blog VSS Compatibility" and it should take you to the article.

Also, boot-time defrag that was temporarily suspended for build DK781 to address issues with Vista SP1 will be making a comeback soon.

Best Regards
------------------------
Representative
Diskeeper Corporation
------------------------

[Lourdes]

Yeah, I've got JKDefrag on a custom PE disk myself for that reason.

JKDefragGUI includes the sysinternals tool for defragging the pagefile and other system files pre-boot.

[dangel]

JKDefragGUI includes the sysinternals tool for defragging the pagefile and other system files pre-boot.

For Vista?

[kalniel]

For Vista?

Nope. But on XP I've just checked and I've still yet to get a single fragmented system file (that the sysinternal tool knows about, so no point running it).

[Breeder]

Thanks for all the replies. I've decided to go for Perfect Disk 2008 Professional after evaluating it and also Diskeeper 2008 and O&O Defrag 10. A few comments on the later two. Alot of people seem to recommend Diskeeper but I don't like the idea of having the defragmentation process happening 24/7. I appreciate that its supposed not to affect system performance and also it can be set to manual anyway. But it kind of defeats the purpose of chosing it when that seems to be its selling feature. Also I wasn't that keen on the interface in Diskeeper. With O&O Defrag 10 there were a few things I didn't like. Most importantly defragging with it too far longer than with any of the others. I was using the Complete/Access method. Also even after running this several times it was showing that my system had a 42% fragmentation with clean install of Vista and applications etc. This didn't seem right to me.

Perfectdisk seems to perform best for me. In terms of speed, the interface, offline defragmentation and reduction in future fragmentation.

Thanks for all your help!

[CaptainCrash]

I'm rather sceptical about the merits of third-party defraggers in Vista - I've yet to see any concrete evidence that they measurably improve real-world performance beyond the inbuilt tools, rather than just providing a pretty picture of files being shuffled around and a nice placebo effect.

I guess if you have a large data partition that contains a mixture of filetypes and access patterns, there could be some merit in shifting large, infrequently used files towards the end of the disk, leaving the fast outer tracks free for "working" data (AFAIK PerfectDisk and Diskeeper won't do this, whereas the free JKDefrag can, with the right command-line arguments). Not something worth obsessing over though IMHO...