Ultimate Defrag

Ultimate Defrag is on first glance yet another defragmentation tool that can analyze the hard drive and defragment it to speed it up. Looking a bit closer however will reveal another feature that has never been before implemented in defragmentation programs: The ability to move the files to other locations on the disk based on the highest possible performance. The outer locations of the hard drive are the faster ones while the inner locations tend to be slower.

When you start Ultimate Defrag for the first time you notice that is is displaying an image of your hard drive in the main pane and hard drive date on the left pane. You can select a different hard drive in the left pane or hit the analyze button to analyze the defragmentation level of the hard drive.

Once the hard disk has been analyzed one out of six methods to defragment and optimize the hard disk can be selected from the left pane. This includes the following options:

• Fragmented Files Only: Defragments the hard drive, comparable to the classic Windows defragmentation
• Consolidate: Places all directories next to each other on the hard drive to reduce seek time
• Folder / File Name: Places files and folders on the hard drive based on folder name order
• Recency: ideal for data drives. Sorts files and folders according to last access dates, modify dates and file creation dates.
• Volatile: A variation of the Recency optimization. Will order folders last modification data and files alphabetically
• Auto: The program uses its own optimization algorithm to defrag the hard disk and optimize its performance.

The user can select specific files and folders that should receive the best positions on the hard disk to achieve the best performance possible. This can be for instance the Windows directory, a game, dynamic link libraries or applications. On the other hand files and folders that do not require the best performance can be selected to be placed in the slower sectors of the hard drive. This includes archives, images and backup files, and files in general that are not accessed very often.

The help file of Ultimate Defrag is excellent. It gives an explanation of hard disk performance at the beginning, explains all the settings and functions in a non-geeky way and even provides examples of how to optimize computers based on usage, say gaming, office and home.

The Ultimate Defrag Free version is available at Freeware Geeks. I would like to mention that I'm not a lab and I do not have the possibility to check the performance before and after the defragmentation scientifically. My computer is relatively new with not enough files to test the new performance. It does make sense however that this could indeed increase system performance.

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