Techie help Plz

Can anyone suggest a good defragmentation application? The one built into XP is kinda lacking.


Thanks in advance.

"Sorry bucko, but CoH and CoV are the same game." -BackAlleyBrawler
"Silly villain, CoX is for Heroes!" -Saicho

What specifically do you dislike about XP's defrag?

I use its predecessor, jkDefrag, on Vista. http://www.mydefrag.com/ It's free as far as I can tell.
Back when I was on XP, I have an old copy of Norton SpeedDisk for NT4 which I could install without the rest of Norton's crap.

somebody already beat me to mydefrag... drat.

Okay, if you have any knowledge of what disk fragmentation means... raise your hand.

*looks around and sees no hands raised up* Oooh good, that was the result I hoped for.

First, check out this blog : http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/ind..._defragmenting

That gives a good overview of why file systems like EXT, ReiserFS, ... well. Okay, lets be honest here, any file system that was not made by Microsoft, does not really suffer from fragmentation. Though in all fairness, there are tools available to do an online defrag of some fragmentation resistant file systems: http://lwn.net/Articles/284529/

If you actually want to dig deeper and find out how a file system works, and explore why fragmentation happens, and how it can be prevented, you could go and get involved with the development of BTRFS: http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page or EXT4 : http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

Now, the MyDefrag site does include a quick blurb about why their Defragger is better than the Windows Defragger : http://mydefrag.com/FAQGeneralInform...Defragger.html

What you need to know about the Windows defragger... is that it sucks. Okay, I realize that's not really helpful. Let me show you:

http://www.mepisguides.com/Windows/d...efragment.html
http://www.mepisguides.com/Windows/d...nt-Part-2.html

*kisses those on phone modem bai bai*









Okay, in all fairness, that was Windows 2000, not Xp, and the old version of JKDefrag, not the current MyDefrag version.

Thing is, the Windows Xp defragger is actually less efficient... and the NT6 defragger is even worse. Quite simply, Microsoft's defragging tool does not defragment a drive.

The reason for the lack of efficiency on Microsoft's part is actually due to drive speed. With today's affordable 1 Terabyte drives, SATA-3gb controllers, and drives with monstrous amounts of cache, fragmentation doesn't cause that big of a performance hit. In addition, Windows maintenance is longer taught. Best Buy doesn't make you sit down and take an hour long course over how to care for your Windows computer. So there's a flood of users who have never heard of defragging their drive, and because the raw speed of the drive hides any performance glitches, routine maintenance just becomes a non-issue.

The bf and I both use jkDefrag. Another thing that we both like about this is that it doesn't thrash your drives while defragging, which Windows' defragger likes to do. I won't rehash the other reasons, but the post above mine does a really good job of explaining those other reasons.