Good disk defragmenter?

[Reddwarf]

The windows defrag utility does not do a good job so I'v been using Defraggler but it is slow... Does anybody know of a wuick and good defragmenting program that is free or fairly cheap?

[Lao Pan]

I have been trying to find a decent defrag program - of the free ones defraggler is one of the best. Mydefrag is also good and possibly faster but has not been updated for a few years.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/ is always good for freeware reviews

For my HTPC I have been using Perfect Disc 12.5 for some time which is the best I have found but costs money - the only thing I found was that I had to disable Optiwrite (stops fragmentation during file writing with no performance hit!) on the recording drives as it appeared to be causing stuttering during multiple recordings. It still takes about 3 - 4 hours for a full optimization of the recordings drive (1Tb about 70% full) though. C drive takes about 3 mins!

[pcostanza]

Auslogic's is good too though I do like defraggler.

[Elmo Putney]

I've always used JKDefrag, it can be run as a screensaver if you want- I see its now transformed into mydefrag.

http://www.kessels.com/jkdefrag/

[ACTCMS]

I've been using JKDefrag for several years and I can't fault it...

Alex

[whurlston]

I've been using Auslogic's for years.

[pBS]

I use windows built-in defrag for windows drive [for optimization] and mydefrag for data drives [weekly defrag profile]
that way windows boot drive is optimized, and data discs defrag fast.

[gEd]

I use perfectdisk to consolidate free space (rather than full defrag) in order to minimise the number fragments a new recording gets split over.
Then in postprocessing.bat I run contig.exe %1 (from sysinternals) to consolidate the recording into a single fragment. This only take a couple of mins.

I don't bother to completely defrag the entire disk and shuffle all the recordings around as (to me) it just feels like adding wear to the disk for no real gain.

[Lao Pan]

After testing ultradefrag, auslogistics and defraggler I have gone back to mydefrag on my none perfectdisc pc's - it may be over 2 years since there was an update but it seems to do a better job. I have set up the monthly autodefrag weekly and the daily autodefrag. Only downside is there is no boot time defrag for system files - pagefile etc.

I did see on the mydefrag forum a recommendation for drives that mainly contained large media files and iso's to only use the monthly script for optimising with defragonly in between - to do with reducing file moves during defrag.

[wtg]

I use PerfectDisk as well. A few years ago I tried out a bunch of them - free and paid - using a couple near full hard drives loaded with large recordings to test it them out and PerfectDisk did a much better job than the others. It was able to defragment files that were larger than the free space available. It has many other features besides just basic defrag - boot optimization, etc - and at $30 for personal use on a single PC and $40 for up to 3 PCs, it's really not very expensive. Worth checking out: http://www.raxco.com/pd/perfectdisk12/purchase.aspx