lancer

As the title says, or is the one supplied with XP good enough.

I constantly need to defrag my drives as i work a lot with media, movies etc... mostly about 10gb's each, usually filling up a 250gb driver every week.

---

mlakrid

DiskKeeper works real well, it can be setup to run whenever the computer is idle etc...

---

perris

consensus on this site is perfectdisc

contrary to my usual "partitions are counterproductive", in your case I would suggest if you have particular files that are always being deleted and moved that they be put on a drive by themselves so you can defrag just that logical drive instead of more then neccessary

---

zeke_mo

I would have to say perfectdisk, great software that is worth every penny

---

mlakrid

Perfectdisc is another good one, I dont have much experience using it, I like diskkeeper because it can be used almost by the default settings: call me Lazy

---

lancer

I do have a seperate drive just for those files which is a $250gb sata drive and my os and programs are on a 80gb sata drive just to themselves.

So its the 250gb i need to defrag often. just the over day the drive was almost entirely red in ms defrag, basically meaning the entire drive was fragmented, but i think by the very nature of media files this is what they do.

Are diskkeeper or perfectdisk free?

merged

---

fitz

neither are free.. but I think there is a version of Disk Keeper Lite out there that is/was free

edit: Both products do a good job. Disk Keeper used to be tops.. now a days, Perfect Disk tends to have a better repuation. As mentioned, both products are usually worth the money.

If you must go cheap, you can look at creating a scheduled task for the the built-in XP defrag utility (run "defrag <drive letter> -f" from the command line). I haven't used many of the "free" defrag utilities out there..

Disk Keeper lite is a trimmed down version of the full product, but I don't think it allowed for scheduled and/or continous defrag during idle time that the full product allows.

Contig from SysInternals will defrag a single file and works well the times that I've used it. They have a defrag utility specifically for Page files as well.. but it won't do a whole disk.

The only other one that I know of but have never used is DirMS and BuzzSaw

---

lancer

ok going back to my thread heading

---

mlakrid

Never used it; but its free:

Here is diskeeper LITE:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207
Its FREE but does not run automatically.. manually only.. but its still free...

http://www.nonags.com/nonags/diskmg.html

and another:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...agmenter.shtml

---

madmatt

lancer, with Vista right around the corner and depending whether or not you plan on upgrading right away... You may want to hold off. Vista's disk defragmenter has made great strides and will likely eliminate the need for a third part defragmenter.

---

fitz

depending on how full your drive is and what your needs really are, if you have a fairly decent amount of free space on the drive, personally, I would just schedule a task overnight run the built in defrag against the drive overnight while you sleep every night.

edit: Being the Command Line Junkie that i am..

Running this from the command line will create a scheduled job to run a defrag on your D: drive every night starting at 1AM.. change drive letter as necessary..

---

lancer

greta i've done that, how do i delete the job if i don't want it to run anymore?

---

madmatt

You mean this...?

Control Panel
Switch to Classic View
Scheduled Tasks

---

fitz

Yes. you can view them from the scheduled tasks.. either through control panel or going to "start/programs/accessories/system tools/scheduled tasks"

Again.. being a command line junkie, if you just type "at" on the command line, it will bring up a list of jobs scheduled through "at'. Each job has an associated ID number.

Typing "at <id> /delete" will delete that job. If you want to delete all jobs, just type "at /delete" and the command line.

---

lancer

i wasn't sure if it would be there, thanks madmatt, i must sound like a fool at times

---

kcnychief

I'm actually becoming rather addicted to doing things via the command line. That, in conjunction with most of my users run in a limited mode (no admin access), I need things to run under elevated priveleges...

I schedule defrags to run as SYSTEM

AT 02:30 /EVERY:t "defrag c: -f"

I elect to run the defrag each tuesday morning at about 2:30 AM

---

lancer

what does the f mean?

---

fitz

it's a switch for the defrag command to force defrag to run on the the drive even if free space is low.

edit: Normally, if there isn't a lot of free space on the drive, defrag will complain and quit

---

lancer

oh ok, thanks, i don't know much about comand lines.... good knowlegde to acquire.

---

kcnychief

I believe defrag will complain/quit if there is less than 15% free space.

---