Kelly's Tech Nexus

Defragmentation is one of those often forgotten tasks on a Windows machine until it gets so slow that it’s unusable. Linux or UNIX users are spoiled in a way; they don’t have to worry about it nearly as often because Linux/UNIX file systems are much smarter with file management. Microsoft never really made a big deal of it, and it is a definite performance stealer if not done frequently. Maybe the reason Microsoft didn’t make a big deal of it is because the built-in defragmenter isn’t very good? Oh it works, it’s just not very user-friendly, and most users probably dread the experience after their first go-round. Fortunately there are some free alternatives that are fast, do a good job, and are user-friendly. The graphical interface on the built-in defragmenter isn’t designed very well; the interface is somewhat confusing, and it doesn’t give you much information about the fragmentation level or condition of your drive. The most you’ll get out of it is “You should defragment this drive” or “This drive does not need to be defragmented”. The defragmenter in Vista and Win7 is much improved; not only does it give meaningful feedback, but it can be run on a schedule, which is something that was sorely lacking in Windows XP and 2000. It can be scheduled in Windows XP but it requires some command-line voodoo in the Task Scheduler to make it run right, and that’s not something the average Windows user wants to do, or should even have to do.

Fortunately there are a few free programs that do a fine job of keeping your files in one piece, and they are easy to use. Like most of the third-party defragmenters, they make good use of Microsoft’s defrag API (application programming interface) to achieve their goal. This is good because it’s a proven, safe way to defrag a drive, and there’s no need to re-invent the wheel here. It’s in how the API is implemented that sets these apart from Microsoft’s implementation. The first, and probably my favorite of the bunch, is Piriform’s Defraggler. This is a well written, easy to use application that gives the user plenty of visual feedback on the level of fragmentation, disk usage, which files are fragmented and how badly. It follows the generally accepted GUI standards for Windows applications, so the interface should be familiar. Under the Options menu you will find a place to enter your own colors for the file map of the drive, filters to decide which files are too big/small to defragment, filters for Quick Defrag (which is a nice way to cut a badly fragmented drive down to size in a hurry) and the scheduler. The scheduler is easy to set up; select the drive, check the schedule box, set daily, weekly or monthly, and the day of the week and time of day. It’s that simple. It adds an entry in the Task Scheduler and it fires at the appropriate time. It’s a little hard to believe they give this away for free, but it’s nice that they do. Here’a a screenshot: (You can click on any of the images for a larger view)

Defraggler Scheduler

Here’s another one of the drive after analysis:

Drive after analysis

The next one that I’ve used is called MyDefrag (formerly known as JKDefrag). This program takes a break from the standard defragmenter layout by providing an interface that allows you to check the type of defrag job you want to run, the drives you want to run it on, and a Run and Cancel button. Pretty simple without a lot of buttons or dropdown boxes. A screensaver defragmenter is also included for good measure; this is an excellent way to keep your drive in tip-top condition while your computer is idle. The optimize option gets the most out of your hard drive or other removable storage media.  Screenshot of MyDefrag is below:

MyDefrag Main Interface

After analysis it looks something like this:

Drive analyzed by MyDefrag

Something else I liked about this app is that after analysis, you can hover over any place on the drive map and it will tell you what file is there. This is a very handy feature.

MyDefrag features, from their website:

• On most harddisks the beginning of the harddisk is considerably faster than the end, sometimes by as much as 200 percent! You can measure this yourself with utilities such as HD Tune. MyDefrag is therefore geared towards moving all files to the beginning of the disk.
• MyDefrag organizes files into zones, such as directories, Windows files, files used while booting, regular files, and rarely used files. The most accessed files are placed at the beginning of the harddisk, and files that are commonly used together are placed in close proximity to each other. This results in a dramatic speed increase, and is in fact more important than defragmentation. The program comes with scripts with a zone organization suitable for most users, power users can customize the zones through scripts.
• Sorting the files on your disk can give you even more speed. There are several sorting strategies to choose from. Most of them will take a lot of data shuffling, taking a lot of time for MyDefrag to complete, and therefore should only be used occasionally.
• A running computer will create and delete temporary files like there is no tomorrow. If the harddisk were completely optimized then the only place for new temporary files would be behind all the other data. Which is rather slow. MyDefrag can maintain free spaces at various locations on the disk to make temporary files faster.
• Windows reserves a percentage on NTFS disks for the MFT (Master File Table), but can place normal files there if the rest of the disk is full. The files will remain there, even when there is enough space again. MyDefrag can look for files in the NTFS reserved areas and move them to normal diskspace, making the reserved areas available again for the MFT.

The last one I’d like to take a look at is Auslogics’ DiskDefrag. I was pleasantly surprised by this when I downloaded and installed it; it has been some time since I last used it, and Auslogics have really done a nice job on the interface. It is quite simple; a list of disks, a fragmentation map, a dropdown box for defrag, analyze, or defrag & optimize. Take a look:

DiskDefrag Main Window

Along the lower left-hand corner there are a couple of buttons for switching between the auto-defragmenter and main window. This is a neat idea that should go a long way toward keeping the disks performing well without wearing them out. Here’s a look:

DiskDefrag Auto

I was so impressed by this app that I removed Defraggler and MyDefrag to give it a fair try. Drive analysis is very quick and the defrag pass was done in short order. Another nice thing is that in Win7 it shows a progress bar on the taskbar icon, which is a nice touch. You don’t have to keep bringing up the window to see the progress. In the interest of full disclosure, there is a tab on the main window which advertises their BoostSpeed product. Other than that, I can find no real faults with this little app. I’ll revise this post after I’ve used it for a few days.

Here are three well-designed and effective defragmenters for modern Windows machines. Choose which one looks the best and enjoy a quicker, smoother computing experience.