Hi Folks,
Interesting thread. One point should be mentioned - some folks feel the benefits of "optimization" can be more chimera than reality. As much effort and wear than benefit. One reason, as I understand, is that the Windows disk API (used for any safe defragger since Windows has a very sound and safe file moving methodology) works with a virtual picture of the disk, surprisingly enough. The counterpoint to this is that perhaps the virtual picture is close enough to the real picture to still be of benefit, that question is up in the air.
The author of DiskTune (DIY Data Recovery), another worthwhile free disk defragger, has discussed this on some forum, I think it was DonationCoder. I'm not sure how the "shootout" author looks at this, keep in mind that since he was specializing in defragging I think he is locked in to the idea that optimization is kewl. However I read his stuff a while back. Very good to get an overview of the issues.
And disk access for many purposes is far less a clog-point these days than internet slowdowns and traffic, and often even than CPU and RAM concerns. Not that many applications are very disk intensive, and even there cache tweaking is probably in many instances more significant that disk access placement. Disk reads are pretty quick these days, finger-typing is slow.
Oh, one point about optimization is that you really have to take one defragger and stick with it, since various optimizations will fight each other on placement, moving stuff around unnecessarily.
In the past I liked the Auslogics tool (current versions I think are not free .. correction, that is their registry defrag and sysinfo tools that changed, the Auslogics defrag is fine although missing some Piriform nice features) yet DeFraggler has become my #1 choice. Definitely I like the idea that you can pick files (e.g. take that 10 gb PST file only, or check the others and omit that one) and that there is a nice interface and background tasking and simplicity of use. Excellent . Even if I was trying to optimize, I probably would only do that weekly or monthly and would check with DeFraggler in the interims occasionally.
Great tool, overall, thanks Piriform. JkDefrag has a great reputation too, and there is a separate GUI front-end, however so far I find Defraggler to be excellent and more than sufficient and I prefer when the tool is all-in-one.
Shalom,
Steven Avery