Diskeeper 7.0 Workstation Review My Hard Disk Is More Contiguous Than Yours Eric Grevstad
Wed 12/26/01 -- Do you change your oil like clockwork every 3,000 miles? Switch to a new razor blade every six shaves? Floss your teeth every single day? Then you probably also defragment your PC's hard disk regularly. The rest of us should consider Diskeeper 7.0 from Executive Software International.
Unless you're a PC novice, you know about fragmentation -- the fact that a computer operating system saves files in the first available space on a disk, even if that space isn't big enough and it has to store the rest of a file someplace else. Instead of neat, contiguous blocks of data, more and more Swiss-cheese holes open up as you add and delete files and programs, until the hard drive head must zigzag to five or 10 or 100 different disk sectors to load a large application, database, or multimedia file.
This extra effort can shorten the life of your C: drive. More immediately, it's a real drag on PC performance, as you find programs that used to load in only a couple of seconds taking five times as long. And the problem multiplies with every disk on an office network.
The simple preventative maintenance of defragmenting (tidying up, rearranging, and reuniting) your hard drive can easily yield the equivalent of a 20-percent performance boost. Indeed, Executive's site cites several third-party analyses that say it can double performance for certain tasks, and save thousands of dollars for companies that would otherwise treat sluggish systems by ordering unnecessary hardware upgrades. So why doesn't everyone defrag his or her hard disk daily?
Because it's a pain, that's why. Windows has a built-in disk defragmenter (in the Start menu under Programs/Accessories/System Tools, or the Tools tab if you right-click a drive in My Computer and select Properties), but it's notoriously slow -- it can take hours on one of today's hefty hard drives -- and doesn't do a fully thorough job.
Most PC users are familiar with faster, more flexible defraggers such as Symantec's Norton Utilities' Speed Disk, but even these tools take time, and can drive you crazy by repeatedly restarting when some program or background task writes to the disk three-quarters of the way through the process. Of course you can schedule a defragger to run overnight, but it's still a chore. For an IT manager responsible for a few hundred PCs, it's a mega-chore.
By contrast, Diskeeper's server and workstation editions have a near-monopoly on defragmentation utility sales to corporate enterprises -- and the company is making a new push for small offices and Windows power users -- on the basis of five magic words on the program's pull-down menu: "Set It and Forget It." For 50 bucks, you get an always-defragged, peak-performance PC, with no downtime because you can keep working while Diskeeper runs in the background, without noticeably slowing your system. As long as you're running Windows 95 Release 2 or later (including 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, or XP), you're covered.
Further, while you can launch Diskeeper manually or tell it when to schedule an unattended run, like a conventional defragmenter --
-- you can leave the dialog box above set to "Smart Scheduling," and Diskeeper will defragment your hard disk(s) as often as it needs to, spacing its background runs more or less frequently as it finds more or less fragmentation. You can also defragment key Windows XP/2000 system files not reachable by Microsoft's built-in utility. And except for one tiny stumble (we briefly overlooked the “Set” button you must click before clicking “OK” for schedule setup), Diskeeper is ridiculously simple to use.
