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)

Puran Defrag comes with all the basic defragmentation options one would expect from such a software and many advanced options that are usually only found in commercial defragmenters.

The software’s main interface is divided into four sections that are divided by the tabs in the top row. The program starts with the basic defragmenter that can be used to defragment one or multiple partitions of the computer system.

This tab can also be used to analyze the defragmentation and to schedule a boot time defrag.

The Additional Operations tab offers advanced defragmentation options:

• Fill gaps to avoid frequent fragmentation
• Optimize directories for faster system access
• Free some space for Windows temporary files on faster disk area
• Boost overall system speed with Puran Intelligent Optimizer
• Exclude files from the process
• Exclude files with a size between x and y
• Enable Windows Explorer integration to defragment files and folders with a right-click
• Delete files in a list before defragmentation

The third tab can be used to schedule automatic defragmentations of the computer system. Puran Defrag is a very sophisticated and comfortable disk defragmenter. It is available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. A free and commercial version of the program is offered at the developer’s website. Both versions do however provide the same functionality and the free version can also be used in a commercial environment.

The analysis will display the total number of files and the number of fragmented files on the PC system. Auslogics Disk Defrag can then defragment the selected hard drives. A new feature is the option to optimize the fragmentation by consolidating free space by placing all files on the disk contiguously.

The top menu contains several additional options, namely the option to defragment a file or folder and to change the process priority of the defragmentation.

The defragmentation can be paused and resumed anytime. One interesting option is the defragmented file view which makes it possible to take a look at all defragmented files of the selected hard drive. Most changes have been made to the core including performance improvements to the defragmentation process, better tie-ins with the Windows Task Scheduler or better processing of files that are locked by the computer system.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is available as an installer or portable version. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website where it is available for all Microsoft operating systems that have been released since Windows XP including Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Interested users can take a closer look at the release notes to read about all of the changes that have been added to the disk defragmentation software. (via Download Squad)

After installing the defragmenting software it can be accessed by right-clicking a file or directory and selecting the FragExt entry in the context menu. That’s a natural way of performing defragmentation on files. It is however problematic for users who want to defragment their files in one go regularly because that’s almost impossible to achieve with FragExt because of the way it handles directories. The disadvantage that we spoke earlier about is that it will not automatically include subdirectories in the defragmentation process.

Which leaves it to be an excellent effective way of defragmenting files in Windows Explorer. FragExt does add another interesting aspect to Windows Explorer. It extends the File Properties dialog and adds a Fragments tab to it.

This makes it relatively easy to check the fragmentation of selected files. FragExt is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 / 2008 including their 64-bit editions.