DeFraggler vs Win7 defrag?

hexaae said:

About the new defrag in Vista (enhanced in 7):
Features of the Windows Vista hard disk defragmentation utility

When I first got Vista I found out that the defrag had no GUI to show placement of files and was not programmable in that it would automatically defrag every drive on the computer. Since I have several drives on my computer with over 5 TB of storage this built in defrag would spend endless hours defragging. Is the defrag in Win 7 any different?

I really like Defraggler because it lets the user choose among which files on which drive to defrag. Defrag algorithms may differ somewhat from one program to anther, but for someone who has several TB of storage the ability to choose precisely which files and when to defrag them is extremely important.

~Maxx~
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Garlic- Welcome to the Windows 7 Forums and thanks for the detailed information about Win 7's built in defragger. Like I said Vista's defragger really scared me off and by the time I got my Win 7 computer I had already tried most of the leading 3rd party defraggers and had been using MyDefrag x64 (Formerly JK Defrag) which is completely customizable for quite some time. The software defrags the 23 GB of information on my C Drive in about 45 seconds where it has placed all of my most frequently used programs at the outside of the disc where the drive reads and writes the very fastest and the least amount of movement is required from the disk reader.

~Maxx~

Thank you Maxx.

nailgunner said:

I still run Defraggler to analyze and get the pretty screen with all the colors on it, and to check the files after Windows defrag.

I agree Defraggler has an excellent multi-color GUI that depicts exactly what the status of the files on the HDD are and their precise placement on the disk as do many other freeware defraggers which makes one wonder what is preventing the Windows 7 defragger from also having such useful amenities.

~Maxx~
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nailgunner- As I said earlier I've only used the Windows built in Defrag once in Vista and then I moved on because it seemed to take forever to do its job. Below are screenshots of MyD Defragging the 23.5 GB on my Win 7 C Drive with 6% fragmentation...





The Defragmentation took a total of 34.16 seconds. Also note that the programs on the C Drive have previously been put in order according to when they were last accessed and are graphically represented in the green section on the fastest outside part of the disk with black representing the free space and the smaller red section being the 1 GB of System Volume Information and the larger red section representing the 8.4 GB Page File on the innermost part of the disk.

I can't make any comparison to the Windows 7 Defrag because I have never used it. The above documentation represents where several years of trying most every leading Defrag and Optimization software including O&O, Perfect Disk and a host of other shareware and freeware alike and finally going with the granularly programmable MyD, yes it will even allow you to run your own optimization scripts!



I know that some of the Members here say that the customization of file placement in Win 7 is something to be avoided, but I have never had a single problem result from organizing the software on my Win 7 OS partition the way I choose and as a result having my most frequently used programs start in about 1/2 the time that they used to is well worth the 1/2 hour or so that it took to safely reorganize them on the Disk using the MyD Script of my own choosing which now runs much more efficiently than the unorganized placement than they were in. As an example my 1 GB 64 bit Image Management Program which used to start in 6 seconds before MyD Optimization now starts in 3.47 seconds for a 42% faster start without any negative complications.

As is the standard recommendation with installing any new software have a good Restore Point, updated System Image and if possible a 3rd party Backup Image on hand and any problems that might possibly occur can easily and quickly be reversed leaving much to gain and absolutely nothing to loose by taking control of the placement of programs on your Win 7 OS partition should you want to.

~Maxx~
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Run defrag from the command line
Open a command window and type defrag /? to show a list of commands.
Exampel:
defrag c: /analyze will show how much your disk is fragmented.