Defrag Your Hard Drive

How often do you defrag your hard drives?  Do you think it is often enough?  Defragging your drives can make a substantial difference in performance, seek times as well as the health of your drive can be improved if you defrag your drives on a regular basis.  Keep in mind that hard drives are mechanical devices and eventually one of those moving parts is going to fail and you can extend the life of your drives by making them work less when you try to get a file.  Don’t believe me? How about ExtremeTech.com? This link is to a portion of an article they wrote regarding optimizing performance and this piece is specifically about defragging your hard drive, including the Master File Table (MFT), and your Page File.

There are a ton of products out there some free, some pay, and the old standard that is included with the operating system.  Below is a list of available software for defragging your beloved hard drives.  If you find that you like one that does not have a scheduler then use either ConfigMgr to schedule a reoccurring ad to start the defrag or use task scheduler.

Pay versions:

• Diskeeper 2008, by Diskeeper Corporation
  • Home version
  • Pro version
  • Pro Premier version
  • Home Sever version
• Norton SpeedDisk, by Symantec Corporation. SpeedDisk is a component of the Norton SystemWorks bundle.
• O&O Defrag, by O&O Software
  • Professional edition
  • Server edition
• PerfectDisk 8, by Raxco Software
• Puran Defrag, by Puran Software
• UltimateDefrag, by DiskTrix, Cost $39.95, $9.95 for 90 day license, $19.95 for the Lite version, 30 day free trail download
  • UltimateDefrag 
  • UltimateDefragLite 
• Vopt, by Golden Bow Systems
• Total Defrag 2007 (Home), by Paragon Software Group, Cost $29.95, free trial download
• Ashampoo Magical Defrag, by Ashampoo, cost $14.99, 30 day free trial download 
• Windows Disk Defragmenter, by Diskeeper Corporation &Microsoft, included in the operating system

Free versions:

• Auslogic Disk Defrag, by Auslogic,
  • Download 
• Contig, by Microsoft (formerly Sysinternals),
  • Download 
• Defraggler, by Piriform,
  • Download
• JkDefrag, by Jeroen Kessels,
  • Download, GUI version 
• PageDefrag, by Microsoft (formerly Sysinternals),
  • Download 
• UltraDefrag, by Dmitri Arkhangelski and Justin Dearing,
  • Download
• IOBit SmartDefrag, by IOBit,
  • Download

How-To Create Your Own System Restore Partition!

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen

I Recommend These Books!
SMS 2003 Administrator’s Reference: Systems Management Server 2003 -  SMS 2003 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach  -  Microsoft SMS Installer (Book/CD-ROM package)  -  Pro SMS 2003  -  Professional MOM 2005, SMS 2003, and WSUS  -  Start to Finish Guide to Distributing Software With Systems Management Server 2003  -  Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 - Administrator’s Companion

And you can check out more books and gadgets at my Amazon store here.

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