Best Defrag Tool

                                                 

Last year, Kansas-based William Newton Hospital, which serves a community of 40,000 people and has revenues of over $40 million, made the switch to PerfectDisk to improve its virtualization performance. The hospital looked to PerfectDisk's virtualization defrag solutions, which include tools for vSphere performance and Hyper-V performance improvements. William Newton Hospital maintains physical and virtual servers for database functions such as electronic medical record keeping, financial, inventory, lab and radiology information, and Point of Care charting. Medical Verification is also used at patient bedside via wireless Chart Carts and PDAs, along with a radiology image storage and retrieval system.

The big appeal, according to IT director Randy Mayo was PerfectDisk's unique Virtual Awareness capability, which eliminated "the severe system slowdown on our servers that we were experiencing with Diskeeper." As Randy points out, "PerfectDisk automatically determines guest and host activity to eliminate resource contention and minimize the impact on our shared storage. The result is faster systems, improved productivity and better service to our patients.”

                                             

But William Newton didn't stop there, as they continued to look to Raxco Software for performance and productivity improvements. This investigation led them to PerfectSpeed, Raxco's tool for boosting performance as well as cleaning up performance-debilitating clutter. While its typical use is for the home consumer, William Newton found so many useful tools for slow PC fixes and slow PC performance in PerfectSpeed that they've put it on over a hundred employees' computers. For these users, Mayo gets not only the benefit of the best defrag software, but also a powerful duplicate file removal program and one of the best registry cleaners, all helping speed up PC performance and ensuring these computers run at peak performance and efficiency.

From virtualization performance to an easy slow PC fix -- William Newton Hospital has found its fix.

                                             
 

Sometimes it's fun to take a step back from all the file system, slow PC tips, and Hyper-V performance counters talk and see how the best defrag software tool plays out in the real world. On its own, a server defrag may seem a little drab. But if you see how it's helping a baseball team, well...that can make it a little more interesting.

                                                    

The Greater Des Moines Baseball Company is the umbrella company for the Iowa Cubs minor league baseball team of the Pacific Coast League. Recently, the Cubs selected PerfectDisk 11 Server to boost its servers’ performance through disk defragmentation. The Cubs, with several hundred employees serving an annual attendance of over 500,000, use its servers for ticketing, merchandise sales, food and beverage sales, video boards and score boards, video production, financial and back office functions, and database management. The team's servers have several physical and virtual servers on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 to run the business. Prior to selecting PerfectDisk over a competitive product, the Cubs used the Windows built-in disk defrag utility, but it was not up to the task. “Microsoft’s built-in defragmenter did not really accomplish much in terms of improved performance for our server, plus it was very slow,” said Larry Schunk, Chief Technology Officer at Greater Des Moines Baseball. “With PerfectDisk, our servers are running faster than ever, which means all our employees are more productive; in addition, its automation and powerful reporting tools provide a great value.”
                                        

You can see the complete press release of the Cubs server defrag selection here. 

Play ball. Win. Give your servers a good server defrag with the best defrag software.

The Cubs are in first place. Coincidence? That's crazy talk.

When trying to figure out how to make your PC run faster, many people turn to look for the best defrag tool and best PC optimizer. Look at reviews, head to the user forums, ask their colleagues and friends to see what the options are. Free or paid for. Automatic or manual. Lots of options or few. Enterprise defrag or for personal use only. It's all well and good, and what drives us here at Raxco to deliver the market's best defrag software year after year.

                                               

But we also like to differentiate ourselves in a different way, through our technical support and customer service. So while we truly believe PerfectDisk is the best defrag software available, we also think our service and support are superior as well. That attitude is epitomized by Wendy Clontz, who heads up our customer service department and whom we are proud to have with us.

Dan Baldry is a 20--year IT professional in Sydney, Australia, managing a team of people who sell maintenance and professional services for one of the world's largest networking companies. Dan wrote to me directly recently about what he described as our "excellent service," which he argues is hard to find these days. Here are some of Dan's words: 

                                                

"I purchased Perfect Disk a few years ago mainly on the basis of an article I came across in a local PC magazine that I thought gave a good impartial review and sold me on the merits of the product. With a computing background, to me disk defragmentation is what I would describe as a routine housekeeping item that I would consider baseline for a healthy PC. In a perfect world this would be delivered as a native part of the operating system. You might argue that it is, but I'm suspicious of the standard utility  and a bit wary of the available freeware (though I know they are reasonably good). With my hard disk capacity getting bigger, I was on the hunt for a good utility that would just do the job and I could be confident in (no doubts), so that was why I decided to stump up the dollars and go for Perfect Disk. In short, I wanted to be sure my system was at optimum health and running with maximum performance all the time. You might ask why? Well, I use my PC  for a mix of work and play and it became a bit of a mission to drive the best performance without resorting to a massive/expensive upgrade as time went on. A few dollars on PD seemed like a good option. Eventually I did upgrade but I still use PD as part of the same housekeeping approach.

However, over the past couple of years, with reinstalls, losing keys, lost downloads etc... and needing to call on support more than once came to realise that the Raxco company offered me an extension of the confidence that I had in the product, and that was the confidence that if I had an issue I would get a reasonably quick, no nonsense, response. Even though it was probably only a few interactions over something like 24 months, I realised it was the same people assisting me throughout, which made me feel the company must have something going for it to be able to retain people like that. The consistent message I hear back is that while customers choose our physical products to drive their business based on value and the vision of our company, it's the Services we offer that keeps them coming back. Not only that, but our partners value our Services above all for the profitable revenue it drives - and customers are willing to pay as they have confidence that they are getting a total package. I think it's how we treat our customers after the sale that creates real business, and I think that's something Raxco has understood from the get go."

1. The developers of your defrag utility meet regularly with Microsoft development teams, including file system experts, for a true understanding of file system behaviors, strategies and plans.
2. The defrag utility employs disk and file optimization strategies for the best possible drive optimization, rather than simply defragments files, so it is a true PC performance optimizer, beyond just a simple defrag utility.
3. It performs robust free space consolidation to significantly prevent fragmentation, reduce the rate of future fragmentation and improve write performance.
4.  It's smart enough to just defrag a file -- a single file or a few selected files -- rather than the entire drive, if that's all that is fragmented and that's all you need done at a particular time.
5. It doesn't force you into a single way to defrag - it provides flexible scheduling options that are accommodating to your activity and requirements, whether you need or want automatic background defragmentation during idle time, screen saver defrag, or daily or weekly schedules.
6. It optimizes boot files to improve boot time by 20% or more.
7. It provides a free, Microsoft-certified duplicate file remover and file recycler to further assist disk cleanup and optimization efforts.
8. It's simple enough for the novice user but with free, optional advanced features for power users.
9. It's smart enough to be the choice for tens of thousands of World of Warcraft users around the world to improve World of Warcraft performance and used by millions of gamers around the world to improve the performance of other PC games.
10.   It's intelligent enough to contain patent-pending technology that ensures no resource contention in virtual environments and can boost virtualization performance with specific solutions for vSphere and Hyper-V.
11.   It's passed the internal tests, pilot programs and RFPs of many of the world's largest companies and government agencies, and is deployed in and helping those enterprises today.
12.   It is certified by Microsoft for Windows 7.

• Windows 7 -- defrag with confidence
• Windows 7 defrag -- no file or folder exclusion
• Windows 7 defrag in a corporate environment
• Windows 7 defrag -- real world, real guy
• Defrag for Windows  7 -- "Raxco Software has outdone itself again"
  
   

                                          

Just about every Windows user can benefit from a defrag utility, and the best results come from the best defrag tool. Certain applications and certain uses of the computer can benefit even more, and the area of video performance is one such particular subject. We're happy to count some of the world's best photographers and videographers as PerfectDisk users, but we're just as happy to have recreational and even novice users benefit from improved video performance with PerfectDisk. 

                                              

I know better than to talk about religion in a blog about technology and disk defragmentation. However, I'm happy to to write about a particular church's use of what it perceives as the best defrag tool for video performance. And that's where the Fundamentalist Baptist Church comes in. Located in in Santa Ana, California, in the heart of Orange County and just a few minutes from Disneyland, is where this defrag and video performance story starts. The chuirch records videos of its sermons and more. I'll let the pastor's words tell the story:

"The main reasons for my choosing PerfectDisk are:

     (1) Consolidation of files on hard drive
     (2) Defrag/consolidation of system files upon reboot

I do processing of video. I had used Diskeeper, but that software does not do consolidation of files on the hard drive. When you "capture" video on a hard drive, drive consolidation is very, very important. The reason is that, when a file splits due to running into another file ahead of it on the hard drive, it must fragment at the point. This stopping of the file and continuing it at another place on the hard drive can result in lost frames during a video capture. Lost frames are a "no no" for professional quality video capture, because it causes a momentary jump (because of a lost of frames) in movement when played back later. HDV capture from a Canon HV20 HDV video camera using Cineform was the specific application used.

I heard about your software on a Video production blog, from another guy who had the same problem (the need to consolidate files) and he recommended your product."

No matter what religion, there's only one best defrag tool for video performance.

                                        

Reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements, and often do. Politics, music, travel, to name a few. And of course, our favorite - defragmentation. And while we naturally feel PerfectDisk gives you the best defrag, what often makes the decision to use PerfectDisk a no brainer is the large amount of functionality beyond disk defragmentation and free space consolidation - PerfectDisk’s Space Management component.

From freeing up space consumed by unnecessary files, to being able to find and remove duplicate files with PerfectDisk's duplicate file removal, to seeing a full view of a drive, many users find these tools invaluable. And the fact that they come included with a top-line defragger is all the better.

                                        

Leslie Alder of Austin, Texas writes that she was leaning towards PerfectDisk because she was impressed with the free space consolidation “that other tools I looked at did not address very well. But then I came across the Space Management piece of PerfectDisk and I was sold. I do a lot of video editing and I love being able to clean up my drive. After the cleanup and a defrag, my laptop and desktop run like new.” A slow PC fix that includes the ability to easily find and delete duplicate files.

To the moon, Leslie.

                                               

I’m often asked whether one should or can defragment SQL databases - should you care about SQL defrag. While not an SQL expert, we have looked at this issue a lot and work with numerous organizations that benefit from regular defragmentation of their SQL databases with PerfectDisk. PerfectDisk uses the Microsoft MoveFile APIs, ensuring the SQL defrag of SQL database files is done safely and reliably, without having to first shut down SQL services. This includes both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

PerfectDisk does not address internal fragmentation of databases. Fragmentation can, and usually does, exist at both the SQL Server level and at the file level within Windows. There is SQL defrag software -- specific vendor tools to address SQL Server-level fragmentation. But defragmenting at the file level, what I refer to as SQL defrag, will usually also speed up your SQL server. The SQL server doesn’t know about the file system layout - it leaves that to the operating system.  But that means it also won’t and can’t report on file system fragmentation. And that’s where PerfectDisk comes in.

                                             

Besides defragmenting files, PerfectDisk’s free space consolidation via its Space Restoration Technology helps reduce the rate of fragmentation on SQL servers, as PerfectDisk creates large chunks of contiguous free space, which helps as your database grows. Best practice for highly available SQL servers is to create files on contiguous space that’s already been defragmented, planning ahead of time for data growth and building that growth into the size of the initial files.

Don’t leave your SQL servers behind - defrag them. SQL defrag for SQL server performance improvements.

     
Writing over at the Information Week Storage blog, Storage Switzerland's George Crump last week laid out an interesting analogy with a post titled Storage Checkers vs. Chess. Crump sets up his premise with this:

Checkers is a two dimensional game where all the pieces have the same ability. Its about covering space. Chess is a complex three dimensional game where all the pieces have different capabilities and there is one common target: the enemy’s king. In storage some features begin to look like checkers because they have become so commonplace, but when you dig deeper you find that the capabilities of these features between vendors vary greatly.

                                                                   

Another review of PerfectDisk 11 is out. This one comes from 2phatgeeks, a site that covers many many things, including computers and software. The author originally came across PerfectDisk years ago knowingly, but with some skepticism, writing that PerfectDisk  "was single purpose, it was small but it was full of intelligent features and it was cheaper than Norton. I was, of course skeptical at first. I’d been fooled by bright and shiny baubles and smooth talkin’ before."                                           

2phatgeeks writes that "the newest iteration, version 11, continues the outstanding tradition set by its predecessors while upping the bar even higher for the competition...the feature set for PerfectDisk 11 is expansive enough that rather than just referring to it as a defragger, it’s more accurate to call it a drive management system...the end goal of any system maintenance software is to promote stability and speed and PerfectDisk continues to deliver." 

Regarding price, the reviewer writes that "I’m not a millionaire. If you are, please buy me things and/or send me money. For the rest of you that aren’t, price matters. Norton = $49.99. PerfectDisk = $39.99 for Pro, $29.99 for Home premium. Better product for less money. How the hell could this not be a selling point?"

Need to defrag Windows 7 or just a good defragmentation program? Get the best defrag tool -- it's even more perfecter now. 

You can read the entire review here.
 

After yesterday's post on the PC Magazine article about software discovery being dead, I found it ironic that later yesterday a review of PerfectDisk 11 appeared in ComputerWorld, Network World, PC World, and a host of other sites that picked it up. Here's an "old school" review of PerfectDisk 11 by a set of "traditional," mainstream technology publications.

When looking at how to make your PC run faster and the best disk defrag tool, there is the Windows 7 defrag tool and lots of free Windows defrag software out there. So why pay for one? Ian Harac's review explains why, including features above and beyond simple auto defrag. He even gets into duplicate file software and duplicate file removal. 

                                                         

Harac, in his review PerfectDisk 11 Whips Hard Drives Into Shape, writes:

"Defragmentation is one of the chores of computer ownership, something that's tedious but which has to be done regularly. Windows includes a free defragmentation tool, but there are plenty of competing products. How do you compete with "free"? You make something worth paying for. PerfectDisk 11 ($40, 30-day free trial) is that worthy tool.

"PerfectDisk 11 has one of the best blends of features and usability I have seen....given the range of features and ease of use, it's well worth upgrading from a free product to PerfectDisk Professional."

All disk defragmentation software is not created equally. A very small set is actually worth paying for.

You can read the entire Computerworld article here.

                                                         

As Windows 7 gets into the hands of more and more users, the inquiries as to how to ensure the best possible Windows 7 performance are also increasing. Just recently, research firm NPD Group reported that desktop sales at U.S. retail stores soared in February, driven in part by the popularity of Windows 7 PCs. Overall desktop sales rose 30% in terms of units sold and 33% in dollars year-over-year, The NPD Group reported. February marked the third time in the last four months that desktop revenue grew faster than laptops, and the fifth consecutive month of revenue and unit increases.

                                                  

Ok, so how to boost Windows 7 performance? Well, there's the built-in Windows 7 defragmenter of course. But better still, do a Windows 7 defrag with a more powerful tool that offers capabilities above and beyond what Microsoft provides. You can check out the differences here.

Get the best possible Windows 7 performance with a Windows 7 defrag.

• how much space is being taken up by certain file types
• what percentage of files on a drive are new and how many are old
• what percentage of files on a drive are recently modified or recently accessed
• what are the largest files on a drive, which are the oldest.

• Bipartisan support on the best defrag software -- from the defrag capital
• Enterprise defragmentation evolved -- Remote Free Space Management
• A smarter way to speed up PC performance 
• Size matters; then again, it doesn't
• Exchange defrag software -- ready for Exchange 2010
• Look beneath the surface, clean your PC, shrink your drive
• Defrag analysis -- catch me if you can
• A smarter SMARTPlacement is a smarter defrag and disk space management
• PerfectDisk 11 -- Gearing up for Beta
• PerfectDisk 11 defrag -- on the horizon
                  

• "Truly an improvement over an already awesome product."
• "The best there is, without a doubt."
• "It has no real competition."
• "The 2010 standard for Disk Management. It Simply ROCKs!
• "Improving on an already fine product."
• "Still best on the market."
• "My laptop loves it."
• "State-of-the-art defragmentation for people who like perfection."
• "A prettier interface."
• "World class."
• "Still the best - and now you can customize it too!"
• "The best defrag tool on Earth just got better."
• "The most customizable and comprehensive product on the shelf."
• "It is the best defrag software on the market. It has features for every level of computer user, from the person that just wants to defrag their hard drive to the person that wants to not just defrag hard disk, but wants more about space usage on the hard drive, the ability to defrag while still using Windows."

• Enterprise defragmentation evolved -- Remote Free Space Management
• A smarter way to speed up PC performance 
• Size matters; then again, it doesn't
• Exchange defrag software -- ready for Exchange 2010
• Look beneath the surface, clean your PC, shrink your drive
• Defrag analysis -- catch me if you can
• A smarter SMARTPlacement is a smarter defrag and disk space management
• PerfectDisk 11 -- Gearing up for Beta
• PerfectDisk 11 defrag -- on the horizon