the win2k/xp defragger does defragment your files/folders, but it doesn't do what other products can do, which is to move all the data to the beginning of the drive. this leaves your free space all in one chunk.

i don't know if you'll get much more performance out of it, and it may increase your defrag time, but it is a nice feature to have so you can control exactly how your files end up laid out on your drive.

- ben

I use Norton Utilities. Anyone know how that stacks up?

JL
OTR

I just installed Diskeeper 7.0... After defrag. using Windows 98 built-in program, did not notice much difference, I ran Diskeeper and it completed the job. Only 60 to 70% of its full defragmentation had been performed by Windows. Diskeeper is much faster, defraged 5 times faster and I noticed a difference afterwards. Applications are opening faster, rendering faster, especially scenes with FX, etc. I think it is a good buy, but I'll keep testing it for the next few weeks.

If anyone knows of other softwares, I'd like to test them too.

MoBetta

norton utilities is one of the worst things you can do to your system.

Diskeeper is great if you have more than one drive because it can defrags all of them at once. This is great for video system with multiple drives.

You can set up scheduling so your drives are automatically defragged at night.....

Diskeeper does a better job than the built in defragmenters. In fact, the defrag program built into WIN2K is a "crippled" version of diskeeper.

Why?

because the software is invasive to your system and it is very buggy. even if you turn off all the automated stupidity that comes installed like the doctor meters, you'll still have things loaded into memory that screw up many a system. it's just a very bad idea. back in the dos days NU was great. nothing sat in memory, and the utilities were actually very useful. now, they cause more trouble than anything else.

conventional wisdom would say that the outside of the drive is gonna spin faster than the inside. So a defragger that sticks your data on the front of the disk should be better.

I know video guys who, even if they are raiding their drives, will partition them in half and only use the first half for media...I wonder if this is the same thinking.