Defragmentation works by moving fragmented files into one continuous block, thus freeing up available physical memory. Smart Defrag is a freeware application by IObit, and software from IObit is impressive in general. Smart defrag analyzes a hard disk much more rapidly than you would expect and defragmentation completes quickly. The interface is a sleek and friendly, offering Auto Defragmentation to top things off.

Since fragmentation is occurring constantly, it is important to defragment your computer’s hard drive(s) on a regular basis. The interface is easy to use and the application will defrag your files system while your computer is idle and maintain optimal disk performance at all times.

On a PC that has never been defragmented, a significant amount of memory is unnecessarily occupied by fragmented files and this can slow down performance while blocking hard drive sectors from being usable. In this case, you will see a significant amount of fragmented blocks colored in red on the interface during analysis and the process will take longer to complete, but it is well worth the wait. A large amount of physical memory can be restored. For those of us who run a good defragmentation application regularly, there is little fragmentation at all and is much easier to sort out.

The Auto Defragmentation is a set it and forget it feature so you don’t have to be concerned anymore about cumulative fragmentation. Smart defrag does not run constantly in the background, as this would damage the hard drive over time. Instead, it has a “Safe Intelligence that decides when and how to start defragmentation. This feature also has an interesting interface that shows you the results of continued performance over time. The percentage of fragmented space is indication as well and there is a CPU meter built in.

Upon completion of defragmentation, Smart Defrag clearly .displays the amount of fragmented space before and after the operation is completed while indicating the number of defragmented files and directories. It does a better job than most other similar applications and this is apparent from the first use.

You can set Boot time defragmentation in addition to the Automatic feature. For the average user, this is usually not as essential as it is for those geeks among us who just have to install software and test it out and often we end up uninstalling it anyway. This leaves quite a mess and Smart Defrag is ideal for you to try out if you are frequently making changes to programs. It is designed for modern, large hard drives and, as a result, eliminates long waiting times without occupying too excessive resources and none of your files are ever harmed.

One of my personal criteria therefor is that defragmentation software needs to be able to block those drives from being included in defragmentation runs.

The popular defragmentation software Defraggler has recently been updated by its parent company Piriform. The software, while not blocking Solid State Drives outright, is now warning users if they select a SSD for defragmentation.

When you first start the defragmentation software you see a list of all connected drives and various stats collected by the software. Stats include each drive’s overall capacity, used and free space, fragmentation and a status field which indicates if the drive is ready for defragmentation and whether it is a SSD or not.

You can still select a SSD for defragmentation but the program will display the warning message on the screenshot above if you do so.

But that’s not the only new feature of the latest Defraggler version. The developers have added disk and file benchmarking capabilities. For the benchmarking options to become available, you first need to analyze a disk or partition. This analysis displays the fragmentation of the partition or drive, plus it displays a button to benchmark that drive. A click on the button runs a disk performance check on the drive that calculates the drive’s random read speed.

It is furthermore possible to benchmark individual files by switching to the file list tab, right-clicking one of the files and selecting to benchmark it from the context menu.

The changelog lists the following additions, fixes and changes to Defraggler 2.08:

• Added Disk and File benchmarking.
• Added Volume Shadow Service (VSS) compatible mode.
• Improvements to disk health tab.
• Added Real Value information to SMART data.
• Health tab now supports Fahrenheit.
• Improvements to SSD detection.
• Minor fixes to scheduler stop commands.
• Minor defrag algorithm improvements.
• Translation fixes.

Better SSD detection is a great addition to Defraggler. Windows users can download the latest version of Defraggler from the developer website. (via)

Windows users have lots of choices when it comes to defragmentation software. We have covered a lot of tools in the past, to name a few: Defraggler, FragExt, Auslogics Disk Defrag, MyFrag or Ultra Defrag. Not to mention the first party Windows defragmentation program that ships withe very copy of Windows.

WinContig is another free file defragmentation tool. The portable software can be started directly without installation. Files and folders can be added to the defragmentation queue by clicking on the Add button at the top. Folders includes partitions on the system. A click on the Analyze button scans the selected folders and files, and displays a fragmentation report in the end.

All fragmented files and statistics are shown in the main window. Statistics include the total number of fragmented files and the number of files processed. There is also an error tab displaying errors in case any appear during the scan. The analysis was fast on the test system. The performance depends largely on the drive speed, size of the selected folder or drive and the number of files that are stored on it.

It is possible to select only specific items or all fragmented items for defragmentation. A click on Defragment opens a new prompt. Wincontig recommends to run a check disk and disk cleanup before running the defragmentation. The actual defragmentation process can take some time, depending on the fragmentation of the files on the disk.

Defragmentation profiles can be saved and loaded to avoid configuring the defragmentation every time the file defragmentation software is started. WinContig has options to exclude files from the process and to configure relevant tools like the disk checking and defragmentation mode.

WinContig is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions and editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Interested users can download the latest version directly from the developer website.

Several options are added as start menu entries after installing the latest MyDefrag version on the computer system. This includes running an analysis of all connected hard drives, defragmenting all of them, running a fast optimize script or to optimize flash drives. The real strength of MyDefrag are the extensive command line parameters and scripting possibilities that make it possible to individualize the defragmentation process.

Quite a few graphical user interfaces have been created for JkDefrag in the past. It is very likely that at least some of these will be made available for MyDefrag as well. This will help inexperienced users and those that do not like working with the command line to make use of the full functionality of the file defragmentation software.

MyDefrag is available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2009 as well as Windows 2000.

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 information i 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.

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.

It is for instance possible to get a visual analysis of the fragmentation level of a folder or file. While it is nice to know it would not make much sense if the software would not take advantage of this feature. Defraggler makes it possible to just defrag a folder or file instead of defragmenting the complete drive.

This is of course considerably faster than defragmenting the whole hard drive and useful if you want to work with a certain application. As far as I can tell it is not faster or slower than any of the other defragmentation tools out there but as I said, the new feature makes it stick out from the rest.

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Defraggler

I’m lazy. I do not want to right-click the drive, select Properties, change to the Tools tab and click on Defragment Now. Fortunately for users like me there is a workaround that adds the option to defragment your hard drive to the right-click menu when you perform that operation on a drive. We only need to add one new key to the registry and the option appears whenever we right-click a drive from then on.

Open your registry by hitting the windows key and R. The run dialog appears, enter regedit and hit enter. Navigate to the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell. If the shell key is missing create it by right-clicking on Drive and selecting NEW, KEY and enter the name shell. Create a subkey the same way naming it defragnow. Double-click the default value on the left side and add a name for the command that will appear in the right-click menu, defrag for instance.

Right-click on defragnow and create a new subkey called command. Double-Click the Default entry on the left side again and enter the following value: defrag.exe %1 -v

Once done close the registry and right-click a drive to see if the new option defrag appears. If it does test it by left-clicking on it, a new window should appear and the defragmentation should automatically start.

SpeeDefrag is the answer to my calls and probably to yours as well. Instead of defragmenting the hard drives with Microsoft Windows running on the background it restarts the computer and defragments the hard drives before Windows starts. This means it is able to utilize more resources for the task and that there are less background processes from windows running who might interfere with the defragmentation.

You may opt that SpeeDefrag will shutdown or restart your computer once the defragmentation process has finished. SpeeDefrag automatically detects the hard drives, better partitions, that are connected at the moment and gives you the option to select each one to be defragmented.