fastest defragger

which would be the fastest defragger, I just ran the windows one not too long ago and it took quite a bit of time, which would be the best one weather freeware or shareware.

 

they all do the same job,the faster the defrag the less thorough,I'm looking for the opposite a slower more detailed defrag,if you defrag every couple of weeks it will take much less time

 

What are your system specs? XP Pro, 98SE, or what? How much free space on your hard drive/s? What CPU, Ram, etc? Defraggers should be run often. The more often, the less time they take. I run Norton Speeddisk 4-6 times per week, to keep my hard drive contents as contiguous as possible. Bazza

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Holy crap! How long do your hard drives last?
That's ALOT of wear an tear!

 

4-6 times a week is a bit excessive. Id say once a month would do it. Thats what i do.

 

Different strokes for different folks. I am not a power user, not a gamer, don't burn DVD's, etc., and hard drives are not huge in capacity. Bazza

 

Dude, you should know that you're more than likely doing more harm than good. When you defrag, you read/delete/re-write EVERY sector on the hard drive. That's alot of wear on those poor disks! None of the points you've brought up here make sense to me. Being a power user? What do you mean by that? I fail to see the relevance. Not a gamer? That's more reason NOT to defrag... defragging is primarily to speed up application launch. Don't burn DVDs? Again, another reason not to... you wouldn't have massive amounts of reading and writing to the HDD. Hard drives aren't huge in capacity...this I understand what you mean...it doesn't take long to defrag. Thing is, you shouldn't get enough fragmentation to justify that amount of wear.

 

That makes nosence. From what you say you really have no need to speed up your pc by defraging as you dont need the speed.

So why is it that you do it 4-6 times a week

 

Thanks Halo, for pointing us back to the original question. I was going to give a serve on why I defrag often. All I'll say is that I do a lot of searching the net every day on different topics. As such, lots of gifs, cookies, etc., accumulate every session. Each gif, cookie, takes up a cluster at least. In one session it is not uncommon for Cleanup!/CCleaner/EmpTemp to remove over 1000 such useless, no longer required, bits of info. A hard drive quickly looks like a shotgun shot has been patterned on it, when you delete all the crap. That is why I defrag often.

My experience in computers goes back to the early 1980's with a Tandy Model 1 and a cassette recorder as storage. My first hard drive was a SEAGATE 20megabyte in 1986, (not gigabyte, but megabyte). I have never had a hard drive wear out. Don't know anyone who has. Maybe the Mythbusters should do an exercise on that point. Bazza

 

O&O v8 defragger here.Access defrag once a month and space defrag coupla times a week after a Ccleaner run.Access takes around 5 minutes and space roughly a minute.

Tried Diskeeper and Perfect disk and they are just as good but prefer O&O.Shame none of them wipe free space which Nortons speed disk supposedly does,but the only Nortons product I use is ghost 2003.

P4,3ghz,1gram.
3 gig used space on a 120 gig drive.

 

I've set Diskeeper to do the job, its fast and uses very little system resources and defrags the MFT and paging file too. I have personally experienced faster boot with regular defragmentation and defrag once a week, sometimes more often as i do use some HD intensive applications. How often to defrag depends on individual users, but with the kind of file sizes we have nowadays, videos/MP3s and the number of updates, patches etc we keep downloading, it would be good to make it a part of the maintenance routine.

 

Just to expand on yesterday's post. Cleanup! found and deleted 1827 files in a 2-3 hour session on the Net, yesterday. That is why I defrag often. Bazza

Cleanup! http://www.stevengould.org/

NOT

Cleanup! http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=990

Different program from the first one listed above. This one you have to PAY $$$ for, as well.

 

Well i would say use diskeeper to check the drive. I use it and the only problem i have is that for some odd reason one group of files on the drive do not defrag. No matter what i do to it it wont touch em. but I have win2k and its a little more touchy on the drive than winxp is. I had it on the system when it was running winxp and had no problems. I would vote for that.
-the new tech guy