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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial
« on: April 21, 2009, 12:48 PM »First of all I'm sorry for venting, but...
[rant]
I used to pay for DisKeeper (until version 8 or so), my main frustration with that one was that I have to have 15% of harddisk space free before defragmentation could took place.
Given the harddisk sizes of today that is a sizable chunk of space (for example: 30GByte on a 200 GByte disk/partition!!!!). The stupidity of that rule baffles me to no end. I have been around PC's long enough to know why that rule was put into place, but today that rule is insane.
With today's 1Tbyte drives i am not allowed to use 150GByte, because my defragger won't allow for it?!?
Denying me a 'snappy' system just because I use the total capacity of my hard disk?!??!
Do you have (an) contiguous file(s) of 150GByte in size on your disk? The biggest single file I have seen was 35Gbyte (Oracle database file).
Because the file size of the biggest (fragmented) file on a harddisk and equivalent free space on a harddisk should be the only reason why defrag software isn't able to start. And even that should actually not be a reason to start defragmenting the files that do fit in the available free space.
In that sense most defragmenting software has a lot of growing up to do.
Not the software from DiskTrix though. The harddisk in my system is an IDE WD Caviar with a capacity of 160GByte capacity (unformatted, 149GByte formatted). Directory Opus reports that this disk has 2,3Gbyte of free space or 1.5% free.
DiskTrix starts without any problem.
If Perfect Disk would commence to defragment my disk all the power to it, but my guess is that it either will not commence or will be painfully slow because of all the (literally) grinding work. DiskTrix commences without problems and it will take quite some time because of the amount of files, but it goes on without complaining.
Furthermore, how often is defragmenting required? DisKeeper was setup to run every night when I was asleep and still the results were not that great. Defragging every night puts (quite) some wear and tear on the disk. Nowadays I have scheduled the defrag software to run once a month.[/rant]
How often to defrag? Seems to me, one reasonable standard would be to reduce overall disk usage. At what point does defragging stop decreasing overall disk usage and start increasing it? Depends obviously on individual variables, but some salient estimates would help, and maybe some feature-laden defragger should calculate this for the use in its stealth or set-and-forget modes. Or would this information prove embarrassing to the developer? What if defragging hurts your hard drive more than it helps if you defrag more than annually?
It is just the stupid archaic rules required by this kind of software and the lack of results that drives me insane >:(...and which make me a (very) happy Disktrix user. :)-Shades (April 05, 2009, 06:04 PM)