Software
Review of: |
 An
independent test report reveals that Diskeeper defragments a disk
significantly more thoroughly and from 300% to 500% faster than the
Windows 2000 Disk Defragmenter. Diskeeper runs on Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000.
Executive
Software, the publishers of Diskeeper, claim average system improvements
of 85.5%- 219.6% improvement for Windows 2000 Professional. It also can
be set to defragment the pagefile and the MFT at boot-time. It can run
unattended, with scheduling and priority options. It can even be configured
to dynamically schedule from hourly to weekly, based on the condition of
the disc. The cost for the workstation version is $44.95 for a single user
license download and $49.95 for a CD. More information is available at
the manufacturer’s website.
Fragmentation occurs when files are appended and the space adjacent to existing files is already in use. This also happens when a file is too large to fit into available contiguous space. When a file is split into different pieces, it takes the hard drive longer to retrieve all the data. The hard drive is very often the bottleneck to system speed. Defragmentation programs work by rearranging the files so that all the clusters are sequential on the drive. Such files are said to be contiguous. Eliminating the time spent seeking the start of various fragments substantially improves hard drive throughput. The chattering noise hard drives make is caused by seek operations. A well defragmented hard drive is not only faster, but it’s quieter! I tested Diskeeper on two different systems. One is a K-6 500 MHz with 384 MB SDRAM and a 15 GB 5400 rpm Western Digital, This machine’s hard drive has been in use for about four months. The other machine is brand new, using a 1.4 Ghz Athlon, 256MB DDR SDRAM and a 40 GB 7200 rpm Seagate. Both machines are using Windows 2000 Professional, formatted with NTFS. I have regularly used the built-in Win2K defragmentation program, after every major software installation and at one or two week intervals. Diskeeper found 107 fragmented files and 1083 fragments on the 4 month old drive, and 11 fragmented files and 107 fragments on the new one. I don’t have any objective benchmarks, but performance feels faster and smoother on the old system. CorelDraw 9.0 and Corel Photopaint have about half the lag they used to, 1-2 seconds compared to 3-4 seconds previously. Diskeeper is mainly marketed to businesses. Maintaining peak performance and limiting IT costs make this a very cost effective tool. I was surprised to see this much performance boost on my well maintained home system. The 30 day free trial makes it risk-free to evaluate for yourself. If it works as well for you as it does for me, you’ll be reaching for your credit card. $44.95 is a lot of money for a utility, but it’s cheap for a system upgrade.
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