Disk Defrag Utility

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."

 

• Reduce VMware overhead by reducing the total number of IO that traverse the virtual storage stack
   
• Improve system throughput by producing larger IO
   
• Reduce system latency by reducing total IO and generating larger IO
   
• Improve virtualization performance by increasing sequential IO
   
• Reduce the demand for host CPU, memory and IO resources
   
• Potentially create a situation where the host can support one or more additional guests due to the resources conserved

                                          

Redmond Magazine recently reported a problem with Windows 7 and video performance, where the VC-1 video codec does not use all of the cores in three-core and six-core machines. What does this mean? Well, if you've purchased a new computer with Windows 7 for better graphics and video support, you may not be getting all you signed up for. For example, Blu-ray disc players aren't leveraging the power of some multicore machines running Windows 7.

The issue may also affect Xbox 360 game consoles, which also use VC-1, as well as a few other video codecs. Codecs compress and decompress media files. Most computer users probably don't care about them, as long as the video frames run smoothly. But many do.

As Redmond reports, there's no word from Microsoft on when the problem with the VC-1 video codec in Windows 7 will be resolved.                                           

In the meantime (and afterward), thousands of videographers, graphic designers and the like turn to thorough disk defragmentation to boost their video performance. Particularly when you're doing lots of editing, with large files changing and being deleted, video performance can take a big hit. That's why so many of them turn to defragmentation utilities like PerfectDisk to keep video performance humming along.

Fast defrag. Faster defrag performance. All leading to better video performance.

                                     

It's not often that PerfectDisk and disk defragmentation software get into an article on a hot topic like Google Voice in publications like Network World and ComputerWorld. But yesterday was such a day. Okay, you have to read the entire article and it's not the focus of the article, but hey, I'll take it (and for a ComputerWorld, Network World, PC World article all about PerfectDisk, see this).

                                              

Mark Gibbs, writing in Network World in an article picked up by ComputerWorld and others, penned Google Voice turned loose and finding duplicated files in an article stating that Google Voice is now available to the public. And not being a Google Voice user right now, I will be soon. After reading Gibbs article, there seem to be many reasons to follow his advice -- "...you should really check it out...."

Besides giving a brief overview of Google Voice, Gibbs turns his focus to duplicate file removal and duplicate file software. It's a key part of a cleaning and streamlining effort he undertakes, writing:

"...what could need cleaning out? The answer: Duplicate files.

On my storage systems I have literally hundreds of projects along with various resources that simply exist for our entertainment (such as iTunes) that I know contain in many cases many duplicate copies of files.

So, in an attempt to streamline my stuff, I decided to try out three de-duplication products..."

I agree wholeheartedly with Mark that duplicate file removal is important and a great way to clean your PC. What Mark didn't mention was that PerfectDisk includes a duplicate file manager for duplicate file removal. However, he does mention that PerfecDisk is handling his disk defragmentation needs on his servers and PCs.

So check out Google Voice, whether or not you need duplicate file software or a defrag utility. And check out Mark Gibbs article in Network World and ComputerWorld here. Mark knows his stuff - he's done just about everything in the networking business, from serving as an executive in various companies to creating companies; and as an author he has written four books and numerous articles about networking and computer technology.

Apparently, he can't be dupped.

                                        
 

                                                         

As another weekend approaches, so does that time when many Exchange administrators think about the need to defrag Exchange database, and if they're smart, some good Exchange defrag software.

Now, Exchange performs, on its own, some basic defragmentation. But here I'm referring to Exchange offline defragmentation. Offline defragmentation and subsequent compaction of your Exchange Server data stores allow the operating system to reclaim disk space occupied by deleted data. How does this happen?

As users delete e-mails, the Exchange Server software frees up the space within the data stores where those e-mails reside, but never returns actual on-disk storage space to the operating system. The resulting data store never shrinks in size, whereas smaller data stores equate with expedient backups and more efficient disk utilization. If an Exchange data store starts to consume increasingly large quantities of disk space, the only way to reclaim those resources is to perform an offline defragmentation and compaction pass.

Now, an Exchange administrator can do this via the ESEUTIL utility, but it's a cumbersome and time-consuming task. There's a lot of manual commands and entering of data that is prone to user error. Which is why we developed PerfectDisk Exchange to automate the process and save Exchange administrators time -- lots of time. PerfectDisk Exchange enables you to automatically shut down an Exchange Server, then copies selected data stores to local or remote volumes, and compacts and optimizes volumes. You can also return data stores to their applicable Exchange directories and restart Exchange Server either through the user interface or via a scheduled event. On Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010, selected data stores are dismounted and no services need be stopped. This leaves your mail server available to other data stores it may manage.

A question we often hear is "how much free space is needed to perform an Exchange defrag?" The answer is 110%.

When your data store is being defragmented, a copy is made and defragmented, then copied back to the location of the active information store. In order to create this temporary working copy of the data store, there needs to be sufficient space on your hard drive. The process requires free space equal to 110% of the size of the data store. By default, the boot drive (i.e., the drive containing the WinSystem folder) will be used.

There's a way to defrag Exchange without all the aggravation and without all the time - with the proper Exchange defrag software. 
 
                                                    

• "I used to have problems defragging some drives. A few years ago I purchased PerfectDisk and haven't had a problem since."
• "PerfectDisk is the industry standard for serious defragmentation."
• "For defragmenting, you'd be hard pressed to find anything better than PerfectDisk."
• "PerfectDisk and it works like a charm. Not a hitch!"
• "I run PerfectDisk every night which defrags my drives. (A great tip I got on this forum."

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.

                                          

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.

                                                

Writing in that old industry stalwart PC Magazine, columnist John C. Dvorak declares that "software discovery is broken." In particular, he observes:

"A combination of SEO (search engine optimization) tricks, product duplication, fake companies, and bogus product reviews have muddied the water for software. No wonder app stores have begun taking over—it's almost impossible to find good software on the Internet. It's hard to find anything beyond big names like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, because little sleazeball companies have taken over the space.

"You see them all the time. If you're looking for any sort of utility on Google, you'll come across a ton of crappy and often useless (if not outright fraudulent) garbage that has risen to the top, thanks to what I like to call "active" SEO trickery."

                                                 

Well, I do know there's a lot of junk out there. Hey, there are 5 billion people in the world, and there are a lot of bad ones too - but that doesn't make everyone bad. As one of only 2 real  enterprise defrag software companies in the world, we know there are a lot of weeds out there. No matter what you do on the Internet - work, play, research - you know you have to be smart about it and put your filters on. It's only natural, given the freedom of expression that the Internet has provided the world. 

So everything is not so easy. But day after day, month after month, the largest enterprises in the world, thousands of small businesses, and millions of consumers do what they are paid to do -- or desire to do -- and look for the best defrag software. And while I'm sure many end up with 'crap" (hey, Dvorak's words :)) for a defragger, we know that the majority end up with PerfectDisk or Diskeeper. They do their homework, they find real, valid reviews, and make the determination that the best disk defrag or the best enterprise defrag really leads to very few options.

You want the best recipe for making pizza? You know how to find options and filter through until you get the ones that you can trust. Want the best defrag software? Same process. It's life in 2010.

What do you think - is software discovery broken? 

The PC Magazine article is here.

                                         

                                       

Softpedia provides news, reviews and information on everything from defragmentation utilities to security software, games, and a lot more. Windows, Mac, Linux, Mobil and gadgets are just a few of the categories it tracks. Softpedia's team of editors and reviewers is usually quick to hop on new releases, and the launch of PerfectDisk 11 proved no different.

Softpedia has issued its PerfectDisk 11 review, with some of the highlights listed as BlockViewer, enhanced SSD defrag support, and the new Advanced SMARTPlacement, which seems to be getting everyone's attention. As always with Softpedia, there's a thorough overview, screen shots, and a final section on The Good, The Bad and The Truth, with The Truth summing it all up.

The review points out that the new Advanced SMARTPlacement optimization technology "is now customizable in terms of the file types that should benefit from faster access times. As top defragmenting professional solution, PerfectDisk Professional does not miss anything."

                                             EDITOR'S RATINGS: 

                                             User Interface:  (5/5) 
                                             Features:  (5/5) 
                                             Ease of use:  (5/5) 
                                             Pricing/Value:  (5/5) 
                                             Overall:  (5/5) 
                                        

Softpedia's review looks at the entire product, which for users familiar with PerfectDisk, know it's a big part of the product: "As Raxco accustomed its users, besides defragmentation power, PerfectDisk also includes space management features that are not at all negligible. The module provides an interesting set of instruments designed to provide accurate reports on the available free space on the drives and the data that takes most of it...comes in handy especially as today's market continually lowers the cost for storage devices, allowing users to keep more an more data on the hard disk(s)."

The Truth

Here's "The Truth" on PerfectDisk 11 according to Softpedia, a summary of its findings:

"The latest release of PerfectDisk does not bring spectacular features to the table and does not clutter the suite with useless functionality turning it into a bloated bundle. Instead, it thrives because Raxco perfects the existent features and matures them to the point they become flawless.

"Flexibility, versatility and ease of use remain the attributes of PerfectDisk Professional although these have been pushed to new limits. It can reduce fragmentation even given some of the most precarious conditions, such as less than 1% of free space and excessive fragments scattered randomly. It simply does its best to gather the files together and stops only when it cannot continue, giving you the reason for its halt.

"The few mischieves present in the application are of little importance compared to the benefits of the product, just like the price. Moreover, the application can be purchased at a lower price than it is regularly available ($39.99) through the constant promotions from Raxco."

You can see the entire review here.

                                            

 

• 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

                                                

As more and more PCs come to market with x64 architecture, users need to be assured that the applications and software they use on their computers handle the 64-bit architecture corectly. That includes a top defrag utility. There are certain features of the x64 platform that need to be taken into account when designing and building a program for this environment. Microsoft provides a guide for the development, migration and porting to the 64-bit platform, and our development team has had the opportunity to meet directly with Microsoft on this issue. The result is that PerfectDisk’s operation in a 64-bit environement is completely transparent to the user and it runs flawlessly.

                                           

Here are some of the issues we’ve dealt with for PerfectDisk on x64 defrag:

• The pointer size on 64 bit is 8 bytes; therefore all the code that contains pointer math needed to be reviewed and modified as necessary to avoid possible truncation.
• Changes needed to be made with regards to registry reflection and redirection for WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64-bit).
• There are very strict rules on digital signatures for kernel modules for Vista and Windows 7 x64 editions which had to be adhered to.
• When compiling code under x32 platforms, compilers issue warnings for compatibility issues with x64. All this code and all of the warnings needed to be reviewed in order to ensure compelte transparency under x64.
• Finally, our development team needed to clearly understand the differences between 64 bit and 32 bit in order to confirm that any other applications they worked with handled the differences properly. And since sometimes they did not, they would then need to work with other vendors to make sure things worked just right.

The result? As PerfectDisk user Brian Dohery told us: “I just switched to a new machine with the Vista 64-bit operating system on it. (Product name removed) was extremely buggy on the 64-bit architecture and PerfectDisk was not…ran like a dream and so I switched.” What the top defrag software should do.

For most people, switching to x64 is inevitable. That new computer you get is likely going to be 64 bit. It is very common now to have 4 BG of RAM or more, even on consumer desktop computers. Theoretically, the 32-bit architecture has a limit on the memory size it can address - and that limit is 4 GB. Given the fact that about 1 GB is reserved address space to be used by the motherboard, the maximum amount of RAM that a 32-bit XP or Vista system can use is even less, more like 3 GB.

No need to pinch yourself, it’s not a dream. We did the work, so PerfectDisk just works on x64.

                                            

Behind all the noise, real benefits. 

                                                     
 

                                                

You may have read recently about our favorite competitor's (Diskeeper's) latest release and its introduction of a file system filter for defragmentation called IntelliWrite.

As a major developer of enterprise and consumer software for defragmenting computers, many inquiring minds in the industry have begun to ask us what our opinion of IntelliWrite is. It's the kind of inquiry we expect, and eagerly answer. Erwin Solis, PerfectDisk product manager, went about directing our lab tests on the issue. Rather than give you just opinion, we attempt to provide solid numbers and easily reproducible proof.

So what is IntelliWrite and why does it create free space fragmentation?

The good folks at Diskeeper questioned the importance of total free space consolidation -- getting the biggest possible piece of free space -- in a recent blog post. The argument Diskeeper appears to be making is that free space consolidation can be ignored in favor of using a file system filter to eliminate file fragmentation on the fly. There are three key issues with this theory. First, if you intentionally (or unintentionally) cause free space fragmentation to build up, you'll quickly leave a volume in state where files will be forced to fragment. Secondly, in order to prevent such an issue from happening, you'll have to consolidate free space anyway and therefore consume even more resources. Lastly, by using a file system filter, if not done properly, additional overhead is introduced to accomplish something that NTFS already does on its own.

At the heart of this issue is the apparent insistence that the NTFS file system is incapable of preventing file system fragmentation on its own. Actually, NTFS does an excellent job all on its own, and does an even better job when free space is effectively consolidated.

So - how about a reproducable demonstration?

For the following test, feel free to use any sized volume, large or small. The key is to have plenty of consolidated free space. In order to be completely fair, we've used a freshly formatted 100GB volume so that neither NTFS nor Diskeeper's IntelliWrite will have an excuse for their behavior.

This is what we did:

1) Turned IntelliWrite off
2) Completed a Full Install of Office 2007 on a freshly formatted 100GB volume.
3) Analyzed the volume with Diskeeper and noted the statistics provided.

As you can imagine, we then ran the same test over again, this time with IntelliWrite turned on. Here are the results:

The data shows that, for the area of the disk where data was written, the average free space gap dropped from 49GB to just 25MB. Instead of free space being broken into just 2 fragments, Intelliwrite splits it into nearly 4,000 pieces. Notice how in this example that NTFS managed to prevent all file fragmentation on its own, without the additional resource impact associated with a 3rd-party file system filter. In this case, IntelliWrite provides ZERO benefit and instead proves to be the exact opposite of what you would consider a "green" technology. Try adding the I/O Other Bytes column to the Processes tab under Task Manager to see just how much I/O activity Diskeeper generates over time; we believe you'll find Diskeeper's resource usage to be a real eye opener. These are the results that IntelliWrite provides during the installation of a common office application; the impact for servers is even greater. Recently, a Diskeeper customer contacted us about a problem that IntelliWrite caused for them on one of their file servers; we saved a snapshot of the summary statistics provided by PerfectDisk Server:

 


As you can see, IntelliWrite was effectively addressing the file fragmentation on the volume - but at the cost of creating other performance issues. By eliminating the resource overhead associated with IntelliWrite and applying SMARTPlacement with PerfectDisk Server, performance was restored just 24 minutes later. Here's an analysis of the results:



As many users know, the PerfectDisk solution to this problem is to combine the intelligent placement of files, with the best possible consolidation of free space - so that NTFS can do the best job possible without additional resource overhead. After all, it's not just whether or not files are fragmented, but how and where they are written that also matters.

Our impression is clear. We suggest that users simply ignore the currently available file system filter - just turn it off. Even if Diskeeper is your preferred disk defrag utility, don't create free space fragmentation to the detriment of your system performance. 

Finally, regarding the issue of IntelliWrite being a "green" solution...because it creates a situation where resources are consumed in order to prevent file fragmentation - but which results in the need to consume yet more resources to clean up the free space fragmentation issues it leaves behind...there might be another color I'd use to describe it.

The bigger point here -- make sure you do your own testing and verification. As with just about all software, results may vary. But do your own checking -- just because someone says something is so, doesn't necessarily mean that something is so, right? I think we learned that lesson time after time in 2009.

                                                      
 
Note: Diskeeper is a registered trademark and IntelliWrite is a trademark of Diskeeper Corporation.