The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive
This article is also available in Spanish and Russian
The never-ending two-step defragmenting process of Vista can soon become a thing of the past. With certain tools, we were able to cut defragmentation time of 25 GBs of files with Vista Ultimate from 82 minutes to 6 minutes!!! That is defragmenting 10X faster than the built-in Vista defragmenter! The tutorial also works with Windows 2000 and XP.
Right now, many things are probably whirling around in your head:
- Is this true? Yes, it is.
- Does it work? Yes. We will show you charts on hard drive fragments before and after defragmentation.
- This has got to cost money. Absolutely free.
These “certain tools” we will be using are called contig.exe and PowerDefragmenter.
When we used these two programs, the results were as follows:
Hard drive before defragmenting:
8 minutes later:
However, using the Windows Vista Defragmentation tool took longer… much longer. To further exaggerate the comparison, we ran the Vista Defragmentation Tool AFTER we had already defragmented that same drive with Contig and PowerDefragmenter. It took 8 minutes alone to analyze the drive. By now, contig.exe and powerdefragmenter would have already finished defragmenting a drive. On top of that, it took Windows Vista 75 more minutes to defragment the hard-drive. As you can easily see, the new tools we will introduce to you will greatly cut your defragmentation time.
Please note a different tool was used to display the charts above. The charts did not come from the programs used in the tutorial.
Tutorial:
Disclaimer: Not everybody will defrag within 8 minutes because the level of fragmentation on each hard drive is different. The point I am trying to get across is that Power Defrag can defrag in a fraction of the time it takes Windows Defrag to defragment.
Click here to download Power Defragmenter and Contig. They are both bundled together here.
What you need to know about contig is that it is a bit different than the other defragment programs out there - it is a single-file defragmenter. It’s strong point is optimizing files that continuously become fragmented. If contig determines that the file can be optimized, it is then moved into the free spaces of the disk.
No installation is required. The next step is to run Power Defragmenter. Click next, and you will arrive at the screen below:
You may then select from the following options:
Defragment File(s): Allows you to defragment up to 4 files
Defragment Folder(s): Allows you to defragment up to 4 folders
Defragment Disk: Allows you to defragment a disk
PowerMode(TM) Disk Defragmentation: Defragments at a power equivalent to two consecutive defragmentations. Time does not necessarily double.
After you click next, just choose the desired drive, and you’re good to go.
When you are finished, the command prompt window will read “Windows Disk Defragmenter…”
This is pretty much the fastest defragment you can ever get with great effectiveness. If you’re looking for something that is similar to what Windows Defragment does but at a faster speed, I would suggest Auslogics Disk Defragmenter.
Update: This is the only down-side to contig. It does not really tell you how well the fragmentation process went but as you could see from the visuals above, it is quite effective. If you wait 3-5 minutes before closing the window after the process is finished, the following statistics will be displayed:
- Hard Drive Space
- Free Space
- Largest free space extent
- Percent File Fragmentation
Follow-up:
Many are saying that Microsoft said it is unnecessary to defragment NTFS. While that may be true, many are noticing an increase in performance once they defrag their system, including myself. This article is a tutorial on how to speed up the defragmentation process, not one that is asking you to defragment your drive if you don’t think you need to. To defragment or not to defragment is entirely up to you. Sorry for all those confused.
- Albert
February 17th, 2007 at 3:03 am
Will it work on XP? Or is it vista-onlY?
February 17th, 2007 at 3:32 am
it’ll work on any OS newer than Windows 2000. It’ll work for Win 2K / 2003 / XP / Vista
The statistics here are for Vista only.
But I’ve tested this program with XP and it works just as fine.
February 17th, 2007 at 3:38 am
how do i see the rest of the article? it ends with the 2 lines below for me.
After you click next, just choose the desired drive, and you’re good to go.
When you are finished, the command prompt window will read “Windows Disk Defragmenter…â€
February 17th, 2007 at 3:54 am
my bad that is it lol
i was looking for explantion of contig or something, spose i will follow the links before posting next time
February 17th, 2007 at 7:42 am
oh contig is just a program. was the article a bit unclear?
February 17th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Vista *still* has a filesystem so broken that it requires defragmentation? How amazingly primitive. Those of us using Linux or Macs haven’t had to defragment our harddrives…. well…. hrm. ever? I can’t believe y’all actually put up with this stuff. I don’t think windows will ever catch on–it doesn’t work very well and I don’t believe people will use an operating system that doesn’t work.
February 17th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Even 8 minutes is wasting your time, since you don’t need to defrag NTFS.
February 17th, 2007 at 9:53 am
that is incorrect, unfortunately
February 17th, 2007 at 11:16 am
You surely need defrag your NTFS drive. I know how sluggish it becomes when I do not di it regularly (I have a SATA based laptop). This trick perfectly works but it has taken “slightly” more time on the first defrag of our family computer (4 hours for 19 Gb). It is true that this was first defrag of this computer after nearly one year of use (this is rather children’s computer and they never think to defrag (even if they have the permission of logging in as admin for this kind of maintenance jobs). Thanks a lot for the tip!
February 17th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
it took you four hours using contig?
February 17th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
erm…does it wok on 98
February 17th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
um..not to be a jerk but…wouldn’t it have been better and more correct to title the article:
Defragment 13x faster (or if you afraid of the number 13) 12x faster. I mean 10x faster is GREAT…but 13x faster…that’s even better right?? Maybe at least in the article say “more than 10x faster”
If you are going to give hard fast numbers…well..do the math.
Sorry….good how to though!
February 17th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
errr, let’s try that with “exorcise” instead of “defragment”:
“Many are saying that Microsoft said it is unnecessary to exorcise NTFS. While that may be true, many are noticing an increase in performance once they sprinkle holy water on their system, including myself. This article is a tutorial on how to speed up the exorcism process, not one that is asking you to exorcise your drive if you don’t think you need to. Sorry for all those confused.”
i mean, come on, seriously!! appreciated “speedup” after defragmentation of NTFS is sort of religious experience - nobody was able to measure more than 1% but many are claiming they “saw the light”. Serious file systems (for PC, since HPFS of OS/2 and NTFS of NT) don’t experience fragmentation until disk is like 90% full.
you don’t believe? well do a test in controlled conditions. time the performance of a disk intensive application (say DB) before and after defragmentation.
February 17th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
“Contig works on NT 4.0 and higher. … Contig uses the native Windows NT defragmentation support that was introduced with NT 4.0″
February 18th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I have xp sp2. I ran the program as above, then immediately analyzed in the regular xp defragmenter. The result? “This volume should be defragmented.” Not only that, it wasn’t very fast at all — took about 20 minutes for my C drive which has about 39 GB used. I’ll stick with the stock defragmenter.
February 18th, 2007 at 9:25 am
the reason why your session wasn’t fast at all was because your drive must have been fragmented.
No matter how fragmented your drive was, the contig process must have been faster than the stock process.
February 18th, 2007 at 10:38 am
The main point I was making was that your process DIDN’T WORK! The drive required defragmenting immediately after completion of your process.
February 18th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Doubting Thomas — I have same problem, i’m defragmented my disk using this tool, and when i run windows defragmention utility it says my fragmentation level is 19%…
February 18th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
That’s extremely odd. How much free space do you have on your hard drive and which option are you guys using?
February 18th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I have an 80GB drive which had 47 GB free at the time of defrag. I don’t remember whether I clicked any options. Even the tool after it was done said I still had a large percentage fragmented, although I don’t remember the figure. Maybe it works on Vista but not on XP Pro. BTW, my estimate of 39 Gb used was high, and I am pretty sure my time estimate of 20 minutes was low. The funny thing is that I just defragmented about a week ago — normally, my disk does not need defrag in that short a time. It’s almost as if the tool fragmented my drive MORE.
February 18th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
LOL. no way. i’ve used this tool on friend’s XP and Vista PCs. It has been successful for many.
I am very sorry you’ve had no luck with this tool.
Alternatively, you could try O&O defrag. I used to use it before I discovered contig.
February 19th, 2007 at 7:47 am
There is only one downside with contig, it’s that this tool defragment files, but doesn’t try to defragment free space. meaning that on a FS with tons of small files, you’ll get realy fragmented free space so any new file wil get heavily fragmented…
I use contig on heavily used files, not on the whole FS…
you may want to take a look at jkdefrag, a free (as in GPL) defragmenter …
February 23rd, 2007 at 2:00 am
But doesn’t it run on linux?
February 28th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
it’s not working On Business Edition
February 28th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
what happens when you run it? I’m using ultimate
March 1st, 2007 at 9:39 am
Defragmented for Program A != Defragmented for Program B
I’ve seen this before. Different defragmenters use different algorithms to chose what changes to make on the disk. Some of them optimize a file such as an executable by re-ordering the clusters within the file into the order that the program loader will load them in, rather than being sequential. Some do things like moving files that aren’t accessed very much to a different part of the disk. Some both defragment directories (which are basically a special type of file) and move all the directories to one contiguous area on the disk (not the files in the directories but the directories themselves). Some spread the directories around the disk but put the files within each directory immediately after the directory entry. Some let you specify certain file types or specific files to put in an area of the disk, such as putting all “.dat” files at the end of the disk. Different programs have different ideas of what constitutes a “defragmented” file/disk.
BTW, contig has been around for years. I used a version of it on NT. IIRC, the source code was available before sysinternals was bought by Microsoft. Unless it’s changed since I last saw it, it only finds a way to stick the pieces of the file together somewhere on the disk. I believe it also frees up space that has been allocated to directories where a bunch of files have been deleted but the deleted entries are still taking up space in the directory file. From what I remember, it was basically intended as a simple example of how defragmentation is implemented and doesn’t do any of the fancy stuff. I’m not familiar with powerdefragmenter.
You can see this same effect if you switch between commercial defragmenters. Each has it’s own idea of what should be done and when you switch between them, they basically spend hours converting from the other programs idea of a defragmented disk to their idea of a defragmented disk.
Don’t get me wrong. Contig does defragment each file. It just doesn’t do any of the fancy global disk optimizations for reducing seek time further and the huge defragmentation time you see between it and then running other defragmentors is almost certainly the result of them having a different idea of what the overall defragmented disk should look like.
Note: I’m still on XP. I’ve never worked for a company that wrote a disk defragmenter utility. I’m just a programmer who found the info fascinating when it was on the old sysinternals site. YMMV.
– David
Opinions expressed are my own.
Facts are subject to memory error
March 1st, 2007 at 6:16 pm
All the fools saying that a NTFS file system wont benefit from defragmentation are naive and have not tried it. ( or they NEVER use their computer )
the first file you put on your harddrive starts at position 0. and ends at position 1000 ( one file one fragment OK)
then you write the second file it will start at position 1001 –> 2000 ( COOL 2 files 2 Fragments , great NTFS does not require defragmentation )
HOOOPS.. now you did it.. you added data to the first file.. Where will that data be put ?? position 1001, to avoid fragmentation ( SORRY THAT SEAT IS TAKEN ), the appended data will be placed at position 2001 –> 2499. then shortly after you add data to the second file.. and data will be written at position 2500 -> 3000…
What do we have now ? 2 files –> 4 fragments.. SEEK time will be double.. Then what happends if we defrag the drive..
The two files will be in two fragments. NOW FILE SEEK LATENCY HAVE BEEN REMOVED..
Typically a next sector move for a harddrive is lige 0.0xms but average seektime 4.2 –> 14 ms.. depending on drive FAST server drive –> slow laptop drive.. standard desktop drives ~8.5 - 10.
OK, on a 250 GB drive writing less than 0,0001% of drives capacity we already have FRAGMENTATION..
now when systems multitask more and more, and you write FILES ALL THE TIME.. Try to surf while downloading a device driver,
Start downloading a large device driver 50 MB..
then surf other websites.. you get ~ 100 tempoaray internet files on you drive.. –> how many times does your drive write data.. and how many fragments do you think the 50 MB device driver file will be in.. ?? MANY
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Anyone who thinks NTFS or any other Windows based system doesnt need defragmentation has either choosen the blue pill conveniently labeled with the MS logo on it or just has no real concept of how things really work.
ANY Window machine can benefit from a defrag now and then.
Also, its really not an issue of “putting up with” Microsoft. The fact of the matter if you game, mac or Linux has pretty much NO selection for software.
PC: Gaming
Linux: Server
Mac: Audio, Video, Graphics
That right there pretty much in a very short way generalizes what each is best at.
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Personally I’ve found defragmentation to help. If Microsoft did indeed claim NTFS did not need defragging, then I find that odd…
March 15th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Hmm… How does this compare to Diskeeper 2007 which is vista compatible and is able to do a lot more…?
March 16th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
It took 25 minutes on tablet pc @ 1.4 Ghz 34.2 GB total and 11.1 GB free.
My normal defragger is the freeware AusLogics Disk Defrag. Diskeeper is too bloated. You can’t hide the huge excuse for a gui. I don’t find their “extra” features very worthly. Auslogics works just find — simple and concise.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:29 am
I don’t get why Vista does not defragment USB drives. In XP you can open the defragger and it will show the USB drive. It only works on some USB drives in Vista.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:21 am
planning to upgrade to vista, looks like problem still exists with the default defragger. Could vistarewired person can tell me how good is powerdefragger than diskeeper ? is it diskeeper worth buying ?
March 19th, 2007 at 6:54 am
i have started using the new Diskeeper on Vista and its working really nice. Planning to stick on with it.
March 22nd, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I thought the point of vistas slow degrag was that it runs in low priority so you can get on with using your pc while its defragging.
I use my xp install to defrag my vista drive.
March 22nd, 2007 at 6:31 pm
No, when I did the test, the defragment was not running in the background. As well I have yet to try Diskkeeper. I will give it a shot this weekend and see how it goes, thanks for the recommendation
March 24th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Connected to Vista Bookmark Updates…
Following is a consolidation of the bookmark updates made over the past several days. Vista Security…
March 24th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Features and Tutorials…
BitLocker Drive Encryption A Real-world Windows Vista BitLocker Tip BitLocker Drive Encryption BitLocker…
March 24th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Added “bookmark” of tutorial to both “WIndows Vista Bookmarks” and the mirror at “Connected to Vista Bookmarks”.
Pingbacks:
http://securitygarden.blogspot.com/2007/03/defrag-windows-vista-faster.html
and
http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/corrine/archive/2007/03/24/connected-to-vista-bookmark-updates.aspx
April 7th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Those of you who run Linux and Macs really don’t have many programs to choose from to even delete, so of course defragging isn’t an option
April 9th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
[...] read more | digg story [...]
April 9th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
[...] read more | digg story [...]
April 9th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
@tod
“…those of us with macs and linux dont have to defrag”
oh awesome..you guys also get to play warcraft,…tetris..and yeah that’s all the games you can play.
enjoy your mac and linux
April 9th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Goto try this later at home, thanks.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
People, MS originally claimed that NTFS doesn’t need defragging. Last minute they realized that they were wrong or that their lie would be found out. That’s why at the last minute they bundled a 3rd party defragger with XP. That defragger is a stripped down version of diskkeeper. Look at the old version they’re nearly identical. Bottom line, if XP didn’t need defragging why bundle a defragger?
check this for answers:
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting
April 10th, 2007 at 12:42 am
[...] read more | digg story [...]
April 10th, 2007 at 4:52 am
[...] The link is an article on using two little programs called contig and Power Defragmenter. I stumbled on these two programs for the first time last year sometime. I can honestly say that they are the first programs that I use if I need to defragment a disk. I keep them on a flash disk so I can have them on-hand when needed.  Interested? Check-out “The fastest way to defragment your hard disk” [...]
April 10th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Fair enough, it defragmented all the files and folders.
But it didn’t defrag the:
- Master File Table (MFT)
- Pagefile
- Meta Files
Use PerfectDisk it does it all.
April 10th, 2007 at 9:48 am
FASTER!… not sure about that. On XP, windows defrag didn’t even suggest defragging, with 40% free on an 30GB HD. I think the total fragmentation was 17%. But I tried it any way, to defrag the entire HD. Been running for over an hour now. Hey maybe it is fast, maybe the default defrag tool would be taking longer. Sure would be nice to have a progress bar to tell me how much is complete or something.
April 10th, 2007 at 11:20 am
[...] extremely fast on XP or Vistaread more | digg [...]
April 10th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
[...] View: Full post [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I used to spend a considerable mount of time defragging the drives on my computers and server. It seems the larger the drives got the worse the task became. I tried Symantec, O&ODefrag and fineally ran across mst Defrag, which I am using exclusively on all my stuff. It works in the system tray, rather unintrusive, and keeps the files defragged all the time, as soon as they are fragmented. It takes a small amount of resources and does its function without any down time. I do not miss the time defragmenting and I am not endorsing any product. I just found something that takes me from the frey of defragmentation discussions. 8^)
April 11th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
[...] maintenance, you probably haven’t noticed the long defrag times, anyway. — Adam Pash The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive [Vista [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
[...] maintenance, you probably haven’t noticed the long defrag times, anyway. — Adam Pash The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive [Vista [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Curiosity: Why do we have to download contig.exe separately when it is provided with PowerDefragmenter in a single zip file at the link you’ve posted?
April 11th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I was unaware of that. Thanks for letting me know =)
April 11th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
If you are still complaing aboutyour drive being fragmented even after running Contig/PowerDefragmentor, you should realize one thing: your swap file (aka paging file) was probably not defragged in the process. It won’t be defragged because Windows will be using it - and you can’t work on a file that is open - unless you turn it off. To do so:
Log on as an admin.
Open System Properties (right click My Computer, select Properties).
Click the Advanced tab, and then the Settings button under the Performance section.
Click the Advanced tab there, and then click the Change button.
Choose the drive you are going to defrag from the list. Click the No paging File option, and then Set.
OK yourself out of everything, and then restart if prompted.
Run the defrag operation. After it finishes, remember to re-enable the swap file.
April 12th, 2007 at 12:42 am
C Drive - 56GB
This solution has been fragmenting for an hour and 23 minutes and it’s still going. This is after a MUCH QUICKER defrag using Vista’s own tools.
What the heck is this app doing?
April 12th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Defragging in NTFS is only necessary in some situations. The most common are when people use either filesharing programs or heavily patched applications. A core data file in two-thousand fragments *will* cause the program to become sluggish, at the very least when loading. Likewise, anything downloaded from multiple users (many connections) without preallocation is likely to end up in hundreds or thousands of pieces. In a file such as a movie, the buffer may run down because your read speed is affected by proximity. Can’t read the whole drive at once.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:32 am
here’s an idea… for those of you who have problems with contig, defrag it the convential way before you hit the sack =)
April 12th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I’m going to disagree with things that’re being said here about other filesystems. If you’re saying these other file systems experience NO fragmentation until the drive is ~90% full, that’s incorrect. On EXT3, at least, there is *some* fragmentation, but it’s usually not terribly serious. I have an Ubuntu box running Netatalk here at the office, and with the way people tend to use this thing, I’m getting close to the point of serious fragmentation problems at 60% full.
I’ve seen the same thing on HFS+.
And we won’t even talk about directory structures such as HFS+’s, which is supposedly supposed to be self-organizing.
Moral of the story: If you have more than one user deleting and creating files at a time, there will be fragmentation, and after time, you will run into performance problems, no matter what operating system and/or file system.
April 12th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Defragmenting drives can really boost performance, I’m constantly deleting and moving files around, I have a 250Gb drive that is always 90%+ full (I had to move all my media to my OS drive to get enough space for the defrag =) ) which i hadn’t defragmented in months so when I checked with windows defragmenter I had 63% fragmentation.
I know its an extreme situation but the performance boost in games and applications was very noticable, there was less stuttering with loading and things ran a lot smoother..
Note: I am using NTFS drives, so they do need to be defragmented unless you want poor performance.
April 14th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Update. It took a total of 3 hours and 25 minutes to defrag 56GB with this solution.
How the HECK is that faster then the 18 minutes it took Vista to do it?!?!?!
82 minutes to 6 minutes is a bunch of bull! This solution sucks!
XP - 386 GB of data. After ~7 hours I went to bed. It finished some time after that. Probably WAY AFTER that.
April 15th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive…
The never-ending two-step defragmenting process of Vista can soon become a thing of the past. With certain tools, we were able to cut defragmentation time of 25 GBs of files with Vista Ultimate from 82 minutes to 6 minutes!!! That is defragmenting 10X …
April 15th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
>Those of you who run Linux and Macs really don’t have many programs to choose from to even delete, so of course defragging isn’t an option
April 17th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
i use this tool n it’s really effective. Must have 4 all windows users
April 18th, 2007 at 4:17 am
[...] Fast XP and Vista disk defragmentation: http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/15/defragment/ [...]
April 18th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
[...] The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive [vistarewired.com] [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I agree with ISOHaven
This is a dog
April 21st, 2007 at 7:36 am
John was here
April 24th, 2007 at 6:28 am
@aladin
I run linux on my PC because I want it to run as fast as it can and not be reduced to the running at the lowest common denominator.
I have a Wii and PS3 for gaming.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:56 am
[...] The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive · Vista Rewired [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Lol. Fragmenting drives manually is such a waste of time. Script it or don’t do it at all.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
# 26 David Bell has it right.
I have tried most of the defraggers out there and it’s interesting how much difference there is.
Some people or companies will tell you defragmentation is unnecessary, this like many things is partially true. If you never download or delete anything, or move files around on your disk(s) you might not get much benefit from defragging, in fact the normal argument for not defragging is that it increases harddrive wear for 1-2% improvement of read speed. In some cases this is correct.
I liken it to anti-virus scanners, scanning through >100,000 files every day shortening hard drive life in the off chance that you got a virus that wasn’t detected at file write.
However, for the rest of us downloaders, and file management junkies and people that have too much data to fit on one disk so you end up moving it around. Or people that install large games with thousands of files or several GB of data… Defragmentation is desirable to speed up read times for existing files, and create contiguous blocks of free space for new files.
Not all defragmentation is the same however:
1. File Fragmentation is where the actual files are in more then 1 piece, this affects the time required to read each file.
2. Free Space Fragmentation is where the files are not exactly butted up against one-another, and there are gaps in-between, this affects time required to write new files, and the amount of future file fragmentation (once files have been written into those gaps)
The Contig program uses the Window API to do just a #1, it doesn’t do any #2, so other defragmenters will report that the disk is still fragmented.
The defragmenter included with Windows 2000/XP started it’s life as a stripped-down version of Diskkeeper that Microsoft licensed to bundle with NT5.
I’m not aware if the Vista Defragmenter is the same product or if it’s something new.. but I would not be surprised if it’s the same or very similar.
Diskkeeper is alright but in my opinion it’s not very efficient. I have used the commercial Diskkeeper as well. And was impressed by it, for while…. Now I use PerfectDisk which I find is better at showing you what’s actually happening, and it puts data that is more frequently changed at the end, when doing a free space defrag.
And if you’re actually sitting there waiting for defrag and need to cancel, PerfectDisk will cancel the process quickly, while diskkeeper/disk defragmenter will hang if it’s doing a large file, and you’ll wait…
The jkdefrag program sounds quite good, and is GPL which is always nice… I will trial it and report back…
For a time I created a scheduled task and used contig to simply defrag my download folder (used for bittorrent/filesharing etc) since that’s what it’s good for doing individual files or folders.
However I now prefer to use PerfectDisk on a Schedule with a threshold of say 1% so it doesn’t grind away needlessly.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:47 am
[...] of how slow Vista's defrag program is. Popular site Lifehacker even highlighted a post on how to speed up defrag using third party utilities. Sounds great, but it may not be a good idea, and you may not have to [...]
May 1st, 2007 at 10:43 am
Hi,
The Power Deframenter GUI / SysInternals Contig combo has been around for a long time and is not really that new. It does do a good job in a reasonable time-frame though and has the advantage of being free.
If you need to defragment your Pagefile and Registry Hives etc then I would use the SysInternals PageDefrag tool to do this. This free tool can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx
Regards
Simon
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:33 am
thanks for letting me know…still studying.
May 4th, 2007 at 4:49 am
[...] Werkzeuge von Drittanbietern beschleunigt werden kann. Ein entsprechendes How-To ist etwa auf der Internetseite VistaRewired zu finden. Allerdings defragmentiere das Systemwerkzeug von Vista deutlich mehr, als es die [...]
May 14th, 2007 at 12:23 am
[...] The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive · Vista Rewired [...]
June 3rd, 2007 at 10:32 am
There’s downsides to every format, and upsides as well.
NTFS - The worst fragmentation problems are from programs that cache files from HTTP requests. These cache directories are the Love Canals of fragmentation. Defragmentation on partitions that don’t have cache directories in them is probably optional. The upside of NTFS and other FAT-derived file systems is that the allocation algorithm is simple, so partition management programs can compact and resize partitions effectively.
UFS/FFS/BSD Fast File System - the standard generic UNIX file system these days. Files are stored in cylinder groups (virtual cylinders - the terminology is a little retro) so they’re not only automatically maintained contiguously but they’re kept in the same cylinder group as the directory they’re in. The downside to this is that free space is per cylinder group as well, so if you use it in a virtual machine the VM won’t be able to compact the virtual disk much, and partition resizing is a no-go. FFS is also extremely conservative about disk structure, which means that you can recover from *really* bad accidents… I was able to pull 90% of a project off an FFS partition that had been suffered 40% of a low level format (user pulled the plug when he realised what he’d done) because I was able to find a viable superblock and parts of the directory tree. The downside of this is fairly poor performance unless you have SoftUpdates enabled.
HFS/HFS+ - the standard Mac file system. Fragmentation isn’t a problem, but if you let free space get below 10% the catalog file can be corrupted. I’ve had this happen in Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger. The way to fix this is to use the command line fsck_hfs with the “-f” (force) option. Without that option it won’t actually do anything… just tell you that there’s work to be done. I’m disappointed that Apple hasn’t done more to support FFS - which *is* an option.
Linux - there are so many different file systems available that you can find one with the behaviour you need, pretty much no matter how crazy your needs are. The downside is you need to be a rocket scientist to understand it.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Greetings. I saw this page a few months ago, and it’s taken me a while to finally sit down and defrag. I’ve decided to use this tool, and on the highest setting. Here is my initial fragmentation screenshot via Windows Defrag analysis: http://bsf.man-ma.de/?dcnt=defragment.png . This screenshot was taken roughly around the time I found this exact article. This is the screenshot I took roughly at 10pm PST last night: http://bsf.man-ma.de/?dcnt=defrag-before.png . As you can see, I cleared some space. I ran an error check on my drive, followed by the PageFile defragment as well. Once I was at my Windows desktop screen, I closed all non-essential applications, and began running the PowerDefragmenter.
I would say it started at aproximately 2:40 AM PST. The deframentation is still running, and has slowed down considerably. It is currently analizing some website backups which are heavy with images. The images will have anywhere between 2 to 9 fragmentations and take anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds to defragment a single one. It is currently in the 27th backup of 62. I fear that this defrag will take a few days, and perhaps a normal defrag would have been the most wise decision. I am currently running Firefox from a USB Stick to pass the time. I’d really like to know why the program has slowed down so significantly compared to it’s earlier blazing speed on files much bigger than these images.
June 11th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Does NTFS really require defragmentation? I thought it would onlybe worth for Fat32…
June 11th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Hello again, it’s me. I finally aborted the defrag. 36+ hours into defragmentation and it was only in the “d” folders of my root drive. It’s generated a report saying 13% of my drive is fragmented, and there is 24% file fragmentation. The program sure is eating my ram though, so I’m going to go ahead and close it. Windows seems to think the program didn’t even make a dent, here is it’s analysis: http://bsf.man-ma.de/?dcnt=defrag-interupted.png . I’m just going to use the Defragment Folders option on a few folders and move on. If anyone has any advice or explanations as to why the defragmenter was acting like that, please feel free to tell me. And yes, I am away that it defrags the same cluster twice using the method I chose.
June 20th, 2007 at 4:39 am
is it freeware? cause i love freeware and goodware
June 20th, 2007 at 5:58 am
My 2 cents FWIW. I agree that the stock vista defragger lacks options, takes ridiculous amounts of time, and the overall performance is just lousy. At our materials engineering lab at the university, we do extensive video captures (huge files) from a Canon DV camcorder and Nikon microscope CCD camera, of materials testing and microstructural changes. Fragmentation related performance issues do crop up, if we don’t use some defragmenter, despite what Microsoft or anyone else claims.
My lab manager and I tried a few freeware and trial versions like Contig, Perfectdisk 8, Auslogics, O&O etc and the one we liked the best in the performance and ease-of-use department was Diskeeper Pro.
O&O takes too long to defrag the drives (on the main PC- Seagate 7200.10 250 GB x 2, Hitachi T7K500 250 GB x1, all SATA-II, total of 8 partitions), Perfectdisk doesn’t agree with my system- seems to interfere with other programs, and I don’t have the energy or inclination to troubleshoot these problems. But Diskeeper runs very smoothly. We bought Diskeeper Pro licenses for 3 PCs in the lab a couple of months ago, and it has performed excellently on all 3 systems till date. Upon installation, we ran an analysis, followed by a manual defrag, MFT defrag and a bootup defrag. After that we have left it on its real-time autodefrag mode, and it runs just fine, without messing up our videocaptures or giving any other headaches.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Hello, I used the software that u recomend to defrag my drives on vista.. powerdefrag and config but i experienced that after defragin my pc with that software, it got slow as hell! and yes the time it took the tool to defrag was much faster than vistas own neverendnig defragment tool, but for me it just doesnt seeem that ure derfrag tool did the job properly…
July 12th, 2007 at 9:22 am
All OS’s require defraging. OS X requires it just as any Windows or Linux based OS does. OS X schedules theirs in the background, as does Vista. I don’t know if Linux does, but I’m sure it could also easily be scheduled.
All of the chest thumping about this OS not requiring it should do a little research into how the file are written to the hard drive. Do you seriously believe that if the OS had a 100 MB file to append data to, and there was no contiguous free space at the end of the file for the new data, that it would stop to find a spot that the entire new file would fit into, and then proceed to move the file? All while you were twiddling your thumbs? Your programs would crawl.
Instead the file systems simply find the nearest free space that the appended data would fit into, update the master file table, and it goes about it’s business. They can later come in and defragment the file. This is the way of things.
A smart OSFS might decide that a file is small enough to be moved to keep it contiguous without noticeably impacting the user experience, but that still leaves the big files. ALL file systems suffer from fragementation.
That said, this method sucks. It’s slower that the built in Vista defrager.
August 4th, 2007 at 11:45 am
[...] power defragmenter Posted on August 4, 2007 by maurice. Categories: apps. The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive · Vista Rewired [...]
August 8th, 2007 at 3:06 am
The tone of this article is really obnoxious. Sounds like an ad:
“- This has got to cost money. Absolutely free.”
Would you trust technical advice from an ad? No.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
FAST FREE hard drive defragging (TANSTAAFL…)
voilà ! (since files get copied one at a time , contiguously )
Windows 2000 and earlier (FAT32)
by using hard drive space to save time
this requires pre-planning …
1) configure your hard drive(s) into multiple partitions
2) move stuff around and/or backup enough files so that
you have an empty , largest partition
3) copy ALL files from a non-system partition to this workspace
4) verify using CDCheck or similar
(usually you don’t need to verify but
if you have a hard drive or cable problem you might lose data)
5) delete originals
6) copy back from workspace
7) verify again using CDCheck or similar
9) repeat for all non-system partitions
10) to do system partitions you need a boot disk
such as Norton Ghost or Linux …
September 1st, 2007 at 12:49 am
Ok well i downloaded and have shortcuts to both the powerdefragmenter and the config. When i activative the config and run it, something pulls up and closes to fast for me to see. When i pull up the defrag and run it, i have it scan the C Drvie and that’s fine. But it’s just this blax box with amazingly fast text. Where is the grid with the diff. colored boxes that shows me how it’s going(disk fragmentation map)? Is that the GUI window that i have a tab for but can’t open? If so, how can i make it so it pulls up?
September 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 am
Using the Vista defrag program running from the command line (with administrative privileges, of course) is a bit better than the windows gui.
I usually use “defrag [drive] -w -v” where -w forces a more complete defrag (result of which, from what I can tell, is files being contiguous, meaning less fragmented *free* space as well), and -v is for verbose mode so at least you can see the analysis before and after processing.
Of course, you can still NOT see any of the processing pre- or post-analysis!
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Hello, I must say anyone who states here that this program doesn’t work. Must not know much about the computer world. I defraged my 100GB “E” drive and it took 4 min. I then defraged my 200GB “C” drive and it took 10 min. Thank you very much to the creator of this software. It worked great for and is my new disk defrage program.
September 5th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Install Vista and lots of Nokia Development packages. Ran Vista Defragement several times. Recently used Windows XP Defragement and the files were all over the place. Defragment using XP defrag program and now the blue bar is solid. Tried the method above and this worked but so much quicker. The best bit is Vista boots in 8 seconds instead of 28 seconds. The rattling from the disk seeking has gone and shutdown is much quicker. Needless to say the speed of application load and running is much improved maybe 20% to 50%. Vista Search has speed up. I have always ignored the “less than 3% fragmentation” and defragemented. Just what is vista defragment doing!!. Removing the display of defragment just means Microsoft does not get the thing working
October 4th, 2007 at 4:59 am
For a complete list of all known defrag utilities, plus reviews, check out “The Great Defrag Shootout”
Defragging Vista is a lot more tricky than XP because of the User Account Control nonsense. Contig and PowerDefragmenter is a great combination, but the best way to tidy up your Vista files is to use JkDefrag (freeware) or PefectDisk (commercial). They take different approaches, but they both address te problem of file placement as well as fragmentation. This is important if you want your PC to run faster when it is editing files, as well as when it is opening them.
October 6th, 2007 at 1:40 am
The program is work fine. My old harddisk could perfom faster even it’s NTFS format …
October 11th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Something I miss about XP (having moved to Vista) is defragmentation feedback, being the graphical map of drive fragmentation plus the percentage completed stats. Vista just says “this could take minutes or hours” - totally useless statement!
IMHO, it would be a massive improvement to have more info than a DOS window displaying what is currently going on. I have two large NTFS drives (150GB and 250GB) and just don’t know how long this is going to take (am still on 1st run with Power Defragmenter on 150GB drive and 15 minutes have passed).
Just a suggestion - the software seems okay so far
J
October 13th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
This program Rocks… I have Vista Business and it was done in less than 9 Min on a 400 Gig Hard Drive… My Performance of my PC increase dramatically since I have 200 Gigs already used…… I would recommend this to anyone…… Great work…. Where can I donate for future updates…. Thanks again….
October 14th, 2007 at 3:48 am
Great program. I rip my dvd’s on XP pro desktop and stream them across the home network, so ended up with a lot of 1GB plus .vob files with several hundred/thousand fragments each. Standard XP defrag ran for hours and always got stuck around 75% through. I tried defrag from safe mode and a few other tricks such as disabling virus scanner etc..with no luck. This app ran through 180GB on a 300Gb drive in a little over twenty five minutes. Rebooted and ran the standard defrag and it was much quicker. More than good enough for me.
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:23 am
Well, guess I HAVE to put in my two cents.
ALL DRIVES WILL EXPERIENCE FRAGMENTATION!
Why do I say this? Oh, 25+ years of working with computers … I’ve used this example to explain drives before … let’s picture a drive (hard drive, floppy, anything except R+- CDs and DVDs (RW+- ARE included)). Let’s say for a moment that a drive has 100 sectors. When you write to a drive, the FIRST available space is used first (more on this later*). We’ll make up some numbers here (in order of installation).
20 sectors used for OS.
5 sectors used for game.
10 for utilities.
deleted first game and now we have 20 used, 5 unused, 10 used. If you load another program that is say 20 sectors, it will use the first open 5 sectors (between the OS and the utilities) and then put the other 15 at the end (after the utilities) … now we have
20 - OS
5 - first part of another program
10 - utilities
15 - last part of another program.
This is why fragmentation occus.
*That being said, NTFS and some of the Linux filetypes (including OS10 as it’s just a modified version of BSD) keep track of the most previously used sector and don’t reset at reboot (like EVERY DOS version did). If we did the same thing we did before, we would have.
20 - OS
5 - “empty”
10 - utilities
20 - another program
This is all fine until the “marker” is moved to the end of the disk. Above we have 45 sectors free. What happens after we write to them? I’ve never cared enough to research it, but I’d be willing to bet a few bucks that there isn’t an OS out there that says “Hey, I’m getting a xxx size file, where is the best place to put it so it’s not broken up” before it writes it to disk and thus just uses that now “empty” 5 sectors from before. Fragmentation here we come!
That’s why a defrag will ALWAYS be needed on any system.
That all being said, a few rants about the above posts:
- If you don’t want to learn the OS, turn off the computer. I still look back to the good old DOS days (when I was a kid) and smile. If someone didn’t take the time to KNOW how a computer worked, all they could do is turn it on and stare at the monitor. Now every Joe Shmoe with a couple of hundred bucks can buy a computer and piss the rest of us off … go buy a web-tv.
- Defrag the “swap space”????? Move the “swap space” to another drive??? Think about this for a moment, if you are using swap space (rather than just spending a few more bucks for physical memory (which runs WAY faster than even a SATA2 raid), then you want it at the BEGINNING OF THE DISK, not after all your programs (I won’t repeat was was well written above about fileseek times). Go ahead and move your swapspace to another drive and back … we’ll all laugh at you.
note: if you really want to make it clean, load 2 or more drives and partition the beginning of the second drive to make your swap space (sounds like linux don’t it) and put it there … that way it can be cleaned easily and will still be on the fastest part of the drive.
- For those of you that posted above with educational information … THANK YOU! It’s nice to know that I’m not the only person on the planet that has a clue about how a computer works and wants to actually explain this stuff.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I think it’s an interesting feature…It gives more people the chance to get views having more featured areas. Im in the US, but I found more interesting videos to me, were featured on the UK homepage so I did have it set to that for a few days, but then I changed it back. I can see more of the ‘language’ aspect of the country feature to be more use to people in the long run though vs. the location specific featured videos.
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
“Bottom line, if XP didn’t need defragging why bundle a defragger?” (F0oMonkey)
To play the devil’s advocate, it seems MS claim NTFS does not require defragmenation. Not XP or Vista. It is a utility included in case you need to defrag FAT drives, for example.
Although, I agree with what most people are saying here - the way files are written to a disk means that any format will benefit from defragmentation every now and then. What David Ball said was an eye opener to me, and a bit disappointing to say the least - it seems there is no standard regarding what defragmentation is all about!
So we are mostly agreed that NTFS still benefits from defragmentation, but why are some of you hinting that linux (ext3, ufs, etc.) doesn’t suffer from fragmentation? I admit I don’t remember seeing such a tool in the linux ports.
Another thing, why doesn’t Vista defrag show any sort of status whatsoever?! “Defragmenting hard disk…” Nice:(
Mark
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
“Bottom line, if XP didn’t need defragging why bundle a defragger?” (F0oMonkey)
To play the devil’s advocate, it seems MS claim NTFS does not require defragmenation. Not XP or Vista. It is a utility included in case you need to defrag FAT drives.
Although, I agree with what most people are saying here - the way files are written to a disk means that any format will benefit from defragmentation every now and then. What David Ball said was an eye opener to me, and a bit disappointing to say the least - it seems there is no standard convention regarding what defragmentation is all about!
So we are mostly agreed that NTFS still benefits from defragmentation, but why are some of you hinting that linux (ext3, ufs, etc) doesn’t suffer from fragmentation? I admit I don’t remeber seeing such a tool in the linux ports.
Another thing, why doesn’t Vista defrag show any sort of status whatsoever?! “Defragmenting hard disk…” Nice:(
Mark
November 11th, 2007 at 4:29 am
thank you
November 11th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Defraging took sooooo long (i’m thinking around 1 hour) but its way quicker that the windows one :p
November 12th, 2007 at 2:37 am
Well, either my hard drive was severely fragmented or this program doesn’t work nearly as well as they say it does. Brand new laptop, 1 week old. 250 g HD, 230 free space. This program took 6 1/2 hours to defrag my drive… not 8 minutes, not 10 minutes, not 78 minutes. 6 1/2 hours. I couldn’t even believe it. The only reason I even tried this was because I wanted it done quickly. I know the program is free, but my time is not. I feel ripped off.
November 13th, 2007 at 2:23 am
Pretend im Wilfred Brimley - Blood Sugar = Hard Disk Fragmentation.
“Check your blood sugar - check it often”
Does not matter what O/S or what file system you choose. If you store and manage data - you will be fragmented.
CHECK YOUR BLOOD SUGAR - CHECK IT OFTEN.
Put as much RAM as you can in your unit. If you are on 32-bit Windows - 3gb is good for anyone. If you are using 64-bit windoze - i dunno.. put 8 in it. I have 4 in my 64bit and 3 in my 32bit both Vista machines. 2×250gb Hard drives in 32-bit. 2×300 / 2×120 in the 64-bit.
Check your blood sugar - check it often. There is no wrong way to check your blood sugar -err.. fragmentation. Just doing it keeps your system happy.
If it takes too long to defrag. Do it more often than one every blue moon. Leave the PC on and schedule a task. Doesn’t have to be windows defrag - use ANY FRICKIN DEFRAG..
CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELVES..
CHECK YOUR BLOOD SUGAR - CHECK IT OFTEN!!!
November 17th, 2007 at 4:49 am
well I thought”
time for a defrag, so i hit the button and started twiddling me thumbs then!! oh hello I found this site.
reading content interesting, have learnt a few things reading it so i figured I would drop in my comment.Its not aimed at anyone or anything So please dont rebuff as im not interested.
One of the guys I work with swears by Power defragger and Ihave seen it used on countless machines but it does take rather a long time to do the job compared with onboard defrag I Dont use it for this reason but like everything in life it’s a personal choice.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:17 am
anyway to move files together? what i mean is let say i have a free 150gb disk space and i want to partition my hd using vista diskpart, it wont let me partition it with 150gb, when i use perfect disk there is a “excluded” file in the end, how can i move this?
December 13th, 2007 at 10:08 am
This tool looks useful. I have spent once 5 hours with my 40 Gb hard drive defragment so I hope my new 200 Gb drive that haven’t ever defragmented (2 years old Windows XP installation if I remember right.) will do the work more quickly. At the moment it’s doing defragment for my photo directory and “Program files” directory. I think these can cointain lots of data that should work as fast as possible. When I have next few hours free, I will do the same with the Windows directory and the “Documents and Settings” folder.
December 18th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
what was the tool you used to display the disk fragments?
In your opinion, How close to reality was it?
can you recommend a useful tool to pictorially represent the state of a disk in Vista?
thanks
December 20th, 2007 at 10:51 am
6 minutes my ass…I am using it right now and its already been over an hour.
People need to test things out more extensivly and get their facts straight before posting BS articles like this..
Ah well, at least I got to read some interesting user comments during this now 1 hour and 10 plus minutes and counting defrag….oh wait, it just finished…
Official time:
1 hour and 117 minutes…
This is on an 80 gig hard drive that hasn’t been defragged but maybe once or twice since I put XP on it a couple months ago and since then have UPGRADED it to Vista Ultimate (not a clean install.)
I do download and delete tons of stuff quite often…anyways, not fast at all..Vistas defrag is faster than this for me.
Going to try Mst Defrag now ’cause I’m bored…sad thing is, all this stuff is just wearing out our hard drives..same goes for virus scanning…I can’t wait ’til the new solid state hard drives get faster and become affordable so I won’t have to worry as intensly about my hard disk lasting.
Suggestions: Turn off Vista’s Windows Indexing service (Windows search)…it slows even the fastest of hard drive/PC down and only God only knows what it’s doing to the life of your poor hard disks.
I also turn off Windows defender…it’s crap and it’s bad enough I am using a Micro$oft program and Vista (Which means VIEW)…yeah, M$ can VIEW everything on your hard drive and then try and take bits off that they see unfit for it and then add 70 million background legal spyware processes and make your 2000 dollar PC slow and ruin your disks by doing so…thanks Bill, what a friend we have in you….thanks for helping Bungie ruin Halo 2 too btw!
All right, sorry for babbling…I’m out!
December 20th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Well, let me tell ya…I tried it on vista ultimate…on ONE partition, and it’s slow as hell. I use Teleport Pro to download websites and once this thing hit the projects folder it would take 1-2 seconds to process a page then move to the next. There are sometimes 50,000 files in a project folder and that’s ONE project. The partition is only 53.9 GB. It would have taken forever. I can’t even imagine trying this on the the entire drive- some guy said 36 hours, and you can take that to the bank as the truth.
I have strong suspicions that the positive comments and the claims to the contrary about how it took 8 minutes to defrag a 200 GB disc are the program writer’s friends and family; and of course the man himself under different names.
I just installed perfectdisk 8, and I deleted this crap.
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Crap program. It took 3 hs to defrag my pc. 8 minutes?? kidding…
December 26th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Hmm i defragmented a certain folder with this program, then tried to defrag it again to see if it was already defragmented, but the from program started gefragging it finding fragmented files anyway! I dseriouslt think its technique is still flawed and possibly in BETA at best.
January 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Use an automatic defragger, and you don’t have to worry about defragging. Let it run as a background process and manage fragmentation when the CPU is idling. It’s non-intrusive, does a great job managing even multiple drives. It’s a step forward from the obsolete manual and scheduled defragging options we used to have. Why waste time fiddling with the disks when the software can do it on it’s own. Don’t you have better things to do than watch a defragger run?
January 16th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I would always recommend using Windows native defrag utility.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I Must Be Old said:
- If you don’t want to learn the OS, turn off the computer. I still look back to the good old DOS days (when I was a kid) and smile. If someone didn’t take the time to KNOW how a computer worked, all they could do is turn it on and stare at the monitor. Now every Joe Shmoe with a couple of hundred bucks can buy a computer and piss the rest of us off … go buy a web-tv.
First, many people are here to TRY to understand their systems. Cut some slack. Second, it’s asinine to state that because someone doesn’t understand the nuances of their computer that they should quit pestering those like you who happen to work in the computer biz. Do you understand all the intricacies of how your car works? No? Then I demand you park it forever and bother us no more with your ignorance.
I think you got your point across that you’re computer literate. Also that you ‘re an intolerant dink.
I’m just sayin’.
As for the 8 minute defrag….. um, not quite.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Gee, I wish I had read all the comments before starting this sucker up. Brand new NB, total 20GB on a 300GB drive. Nothing deleted yet. Added three sets of printer drivers and been on a few webpages. 40 minutes and counting.
Looking at the data in the CMD prompt window, it looks like the tool is progressing through the directory. I just can’t see how that is efficient.
It is taking longer to pass through the freshly intalled HP drivers than it did to install them. I am unimpressed.
January 30th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
February 3rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
yea i figured id give this tool a try since my vista disk is cut down and has no defrag tool. well i have a 250GB drive with 189GB’s free and its been defraging for damn near an hour now, i also have no clue when its gonna be done.
yea its not 8 minutes but it should help our pcs none the less..
people need to be more patient and people need to not lie that it only takes 8 minutes..
my 2 cents, Pz.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Thanks so much!! This helped me defragmenting my D: drive on Vista. =D
March 12th, 2008 at 1:39 am
[...] The fastest way to defragment your hard-drive [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Defragmentierung bei Vista…
Echt schlimm. Ich habe heute gestern (es ist ja schon nach 12 *gähn*) um ca. 22 Uhr die Defragmentierung von Vista zum 1. Mal durchlaufen lassen wollen. Vorab: knapp 1 Jahr Poweruser-Laptop zu sein ist sicher nicht ganz leicht - keine Frage. Es schade…
March 13th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
The Fastest Way to Defrag Your Hard Disk…
How long since your last defragmentation on your harddisk? 6 months or 1 year? I believe most of us do not defrag our hard disk so frequent due to slow defrag process!
Why Should Defrag Harddisk?
As we know, by defragmenting a harddisk it put our files…
March 30th, 2008 at 2:46 am
I think its funny that Mac users don’t understand how disk fragmentation works. That fact that PC users actually have control of when defragmentation is beyond most Mac users… Id love to see a sector Map of what a Mac users hard drive looks like right after dropping 30,000+ files from multiple sources… Im sure it defragments on the fly perfectly… HAHAHA
April 1st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Wow ! I had 130 gb free and now I have 110 gb free… u read well, no mistakes, It gave me 20 gb bonus ! I took the last opition and I,m running Vista premium. It also took more than 1h30min.
April 28th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
friends
i have a problem , i descoverd that after each defragmenting by windows built in tool a big space on the hard disk will be losted
i mean if i calculate the space occupied by all the files in windows partition (including hidden system files)to get how much free space remain , i will see that its not the same free space stated in the properties page of this windows partition
it seems that the defragmentation consumes more empty space with rubbish data
i lost arround 9 GB from my windows partition
is there any one can help me to get back this lost space
offcourse the final solution will be reformat the partition and install windows again and never use the built in defragmenting too again
if there is any doubt please contact me abdulla_alazzawi@yahoo.com
because i’m not getting a good time usually like now for checking this forum
May 9th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I have tried a few and well…
1) diskeeper was great but screwed with my gamepad drivers for some reason so I stopped uping it
2) i like t know when i can start using my computer again so regular windows defrag is sadly unusable for me
3) I now use jk defrag, works great, quick too. Same installation file works for my vista and xp.
Choose what you want, use what you want, stop hating for no reason. Why are you people so emotionally invested in how effective “your” particular defragger is that you must make others feel stupid just for asking or giving an opinion? Everyone needs help occasionally. The myriad of computer configurations and software installations available make it pretty much statistically impossible for any program to claim complete compatibility across the board. That doesn’t even consider the fact that many of these people are asking for help AFTER the problem has begun - not before. You don’t look for a gas station when your tank is full. Stands to reason then that these (no shame intended) newbs have a number of issues affecting their machines which they are most likely ill - equipped to either detect or diagnose. They come here to benefit from your wisdom and in your arrogance all you acn muster is disdain? If you keep looking down your nose at others you eventually become mentally cross-eyed. It’s a kind of self imposed tunnel-vision where your opinion is the only one that matters. You must have lived a very sad, lonely life to instinctively react in that fashion to a cry for help. thankfully you probably don’t work in an emergency department or chronic care facility. Please try to understand that we all start off asking questions. Many times our teachers determine how far we go. Your answers should help to put the wind in their sails, not deflate them.
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:55 am
After I used this program, my hard disk that I was defragmented disappear/deleted from my Hard disk list and I’m getting slower startup on Windows. Could someone tell me how to repair it?
June 19th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I use Auslogics diskdefrag.Lightning fast.Used it with XP and windows own upon analysis always reported that the disk didn’t need defragmenting.Can’t seem to analyse the drive with Vista’s so i can’t check.Anyway Auslogics does the job and it’s fast,much faster than anything else i’ve tried.
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:35 am
thanks, now i use contig.
i don’t know why these people complain so much about how long it takes, it usually takes long. the wait is even longer with vista’s defrag program.
August 4th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Hi,
IF some of you want to “try before you buy” a REALLY FAST defrager, go to this link and download the appropriate version: They have a 30 day free trial, then it’s $40 well spent. Try it You’ll love it, maybe.
http://www.goldenbow.com/
I have been using VOPT since the DOS 4.01 days and it’s ALWAYS been fast and safe. It also includes several useful utilities, like the one that finds “temp” files, even in folders that you (normally) can’t access, then allows you to delete them to reclaim a LOT of disk space. This last Windows Vista Home machine that I did had almost 60 MB of “temp” files on it that you could NOT see or find with windows explorer, and it was a “New” machine! Oh, and I came to this forum from the one about resizing a Windows Vista Partition (which I STILL not been able to do).
August 6th, 2008 at 8:42 am
very nice!
used and liked it much faster than speed defrag…
is it possible to schedule a defrag with it?
what are the cmd line arguements/parameters?
please advise,
melikee
August 7th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
melikee, Vopt includes a link to the Windows Scheduler. We recommend scheduling Vopt to defrag automatically every day when you start your system. The time to defrag depends on the amount of fragmentation and it’s really fast if there’s only one day’s fragmentation, plus your system never gets slowed down by fragments.
August 9th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
You people do realise that its just calling the cmd line defrag and passing it parameters. Also contig is from sysinternals
August 26th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
I’m a noob with computers and stuff like this. But my friend recommended me to defrag my laptop - >.> would that be safe? Does it really matter whether its a laptop or a desktop?
And what does defrag do? Please reply soon.
Thanks.
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
hey
its very point of view.
Good post.
realy gj
thank you
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Min:
To put defragging in laymans terms, after using your room for quite a while things start to get scattered and messy. Defragging is basically putting all the similar or most likely accessed items together in one spot so you can access them faster.
It’s completely safe and you should do this regularly. (Once every few months or so)
September 7th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
When will Microsoft decide that actually a system by which defragging is unneccessary is much better. ReiserFS is a perfect example.
September 10th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
One quick question. What does “contig.exe” do, exactly? For me, I unzip the combined files to a folder. I see contig.exe by itself, and the Power Defrag by itself. The defrag program by itself works fine, runs and completes the defrag with no problem at all. Contig.exe ‘runs’ when I click it…but it basically just pops up an MS-DOS window on the screen for about 1/100th of a second and it disappears again. Should I even click on contig.exe, or is contig.exe just a file that Power Defrag uses? I’m running Vista Home Premium on my computer and I can’t get contig.exe to do anything or show the above defrag graph like you have. Or was that even from contig.exe? What does it do exactly?
September 10th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Hey.. I`m running Vista 32Bit on a laptop with 250Gb disc.. And when I bought it, it was pre-set to defrag once every week, BUT, if the computer is not on at the time of scheduled defrag, it doesn`t happen, right..? So it will be another week before it does, and IF I move, delete, and mess around with files @ the same rate i did the previus week, it will be twice as defragmented, and take twice as long to defrag.. now, as in RIGHT now, it`s been over 5 hours since I started the defrag manually..
I thought the defragger needed COMPLETE access to the disk, and as such should I be sitting here writing this comment, or is it noticeably faster if I do not use any prog`s at all, just leaving the program to do It`s thing? It shure was faster on XP..
September 13th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Albert,
Thanks for the tip and the tools. I think it’s great that people like you will take the time to offer this kind of help to others of us who are not as astute.
I can’t believe all of the nit-picking comments you have received for offering this defrag tip FREE OF CHARGE. Hey guys, no one says you have to use this. If you don’t like it or don’t think you need it, don’t use it. This is a suggestion - not a mandate. And if it took you 8.5 minutes to defrag your disk instead of 8 minutes, well, gee, you may have saved only 79 1/2 minutes instead of 80 minutes. To which I say “Thanks, Albert, for the advice.” Don’t criticize the guy for trying to offer a helpful suggestion.
Get a life! And look, now you have an extra 79 1/2 minutes to do so.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Hey Chris,
Want to do it a LOT faster? Go to this link and download the appropriate version: They have a 30 day free trial, then it’s $40 well spent. Try it You’ll love it, maybe. See my earlier post about this program.
http://www.goldenbow.com/
September 18th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
The old “To defragment or not to defragment question”
In my opinion, NTFS (and most file systems) need regular maintenance…
The biggest factor causing fragmentation is drives becoming full… which some people never experience… personally my drives are almost always full…
My father’s laptop once was so fragmented that his outlook mail file (.pst) was in 15,000 pieces and it took like 10 minutes to load Outlook…
Suffice to say it took a day or so to defrag it since the disk was nearly full…
The quickest way to defrag is to do it regularly so it doesn’t take as long.
My favourite defragmenter is a simple program that is a step above Contig, but free (and open-source)
JkDefrag!
http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/
- It’s fully safe since it uses the Windows Defrag API (just like Contig)
- It has a display of your drive so you can visually see what it’s doing
- It has options if you want more then basic defrag
- It is fully-automatic, no need to specify any options.
I tried most of the commerical ones like DiskKeeper, PerfectDisk, O&O defrag, Ultimate Defrag 2008, etc
They are cool, but I don’t need that, JkDefrag keeps the disk tidy, and it’s GPL licensed!
Best,
Gaspard
September 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
PC’s are great! For the price of a mac you can buy two PCs or a super PC!!! There are lots of software to use, and in the mac there isn’t.
The computers nowdays are so powerfull, that PC or MAc is about the same. Mac is just a question of luxury and status, nothing else.
October 4th, 2008 at 7:57 am
Hi again.
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation
http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/2007/06/great-defrag-shootout-all.html
The second link is really fun, the guy takes all the different programs apart piece by piece.