Replacement for Diskeeper for 64-bit Vista

Is there any disk-defragmentation program available from Lenovo for 64-bit Vista? I miss Diskeeper -- it was fast and free!

 

I am a fan of diskeeper. The Diskeeper program you had was Diskeeper lite (Home Lite). Diskeeper Home only supports 32-bit. Diskeeper Professional supports both 32-bit and 64-bit. That is what I intend to use. It's not free, but it is not the "lite" version either and will work on 64-bit. More info: http://www.diskeeper.com/products/products.asp

 

There is also Raxco's PerfectDisk as well.

 

Dare I say it, but the defragmenter from Vista is perfectly fine. It was actually developed by Executive Software, the company behind Diskeeper.

 

Yes, Good point. I am aware of that. That is one of the reasons I prefer Diskeeper over Perfect disk.

At this point my only experience with Diskeeper vs Windows Defragmenter is on XP. I just think the built-in defragmentor is very slow and uses so much resources that it is difficult to do anything else while it is doing its thing. Diskeeper can defragment my 500GB HDD in a few minutes.

I think this is valuable because I'm not likely to schedule defragmentation on a laptop since it will probably not be powered on late at night. Therefore you can defragment with diskeeper in a few minutes and get back to work. I also think Diskeeper does a better job. Sure that's debatable, but the main reason is speed for me. If someone has experienced something different on Vista I'd like to hear about it.

 

Well, the Vista defragmentation program is much faster than the one in XP for the reason stated in my previous post.

 

OK, but the one on XP was also developed by Executive Software.

 

Really? I had no idea. Nonetheless, Vista's is faster.

 

Yeah, when XP came out the defragmenter was based off of Diskeeper 6.0 while Diskeeper 7.0 was available to the public for retail purchase.

The current version of Diskeeper is 11.0 So I'm just guessing that the built in Vista defragmenter is based off of 10.0 if history is repeating itself (and especially since you say it is fast. I have 10.0 on my desktop and it is fast.)

 

I wish they would use the same GUI for the disk defragmenter on Vista as they did with XP. Now you have to use command prompt for the features. I just did a defrag and by no means would i consider it fast. The factory installed diskeeper, i feel, ran much faster.

 

I could be 100% wrong but I dont think Diskeeper had anything to do with Vista's defragger at all.

Executive software (DK) did write the underlying code for the XP defragger, which then MS licensed and modified, but Vista's defragger is all MS only. This is what I saw on some other forum, and it appeared to be reliable info because someone had linked to some MS blog/site on the subject. Unfortuantely I dont have the link with me.

BTW I am also a Diskeeper user. Its my personal choice of automatic defragmenter, especially for Vista. I rate it so highly because of its brilliant automatic mode which removes the hassles of manually defragging.

 

although exec. software have some role in vista's and xp's defraggers, diskeeper runs laps around them. I tried defragging my hard drive with vistas utility and it almost took 45 minutes. Diskeeper(I use the PRO version, but the freebie lenovo gives us works just as well) can handle my 160gb volume in less than 5 minutes.

Whats great about it is that it only works when resources are idle!

 

That's what I suspected... Thanks for sharing some actual user experience with diskeeper on vista!

 

The preinstalled Diskeeper for Vista 32-bit is definitely a lot faster then the Disk Defragmenter on Vista. The Vista Disk Degramenter took a little over 30minutes to do my hard drive, while the Preinstalled diskeeper took no more then 2 or 3 minutes. Too bad the free version isnt compatible with Vista 64.

 

Microsoft cut their ties with the old diskeeper code base when then started developing for Windows XP. While the XP defragmenter refers to Executive Software, they did NOT co-develop (kinda of like with older versions of IE that say that it is based on NCSA Mosaic). Vista defrag was pretty much a re-write in order to improve defrag performance and do a better job of free space consolidation. However, it's not as feature rich and defrag heavy as a commercial product.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File Systems

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

 

How often do you defrag you HD?

 

That's just the thing. I didn't defrag very often at all with the with the built-in defragmenter. It takes so long that I wouldn''t bother until I could actually notice system performance. With Diskeeper I do it about once every week or two since it only takes a few minutes.

From what I understand the latest Diskeeper 11.0 will auto defrag on-demand/on-the-fly when your system is at idle and will stop as soon as you start doing something.

@gshayes - How about perfectdisk? Does it do that? Any reason why you think either perfectdisk or diskeeper is superior from the other? Or are they basically the same?

 

Difference in philosophy/technique between PD and DK. For example, PD does free space consolidation - which improves write performance and slows down the rate of refragmentation. PD is a single pass defragmenter - when it finishes running your drive will be in the best shape possible. You can schedule PD when you want it to run (screen saver, scheduled time with maximum duration, etc...). You can adjust CPU priority and do disk throtting. PD defragments files that most defragmenters don't even tell you about (because they don't defragment some files). PD will defragment multi-terrabyte drives without a special (pricier) version. Lots of other things as well.

DK does NOT defrag on-the-fly. DK simply continously runs in the background using idle resources (what if your computer has little idle resources) slowly chipping away at fragmentation over a period of time. There are files that DK doesn't touch (and doesn't tell you about), it primarily concentrates on improving read performance - not as much on improving write performance.

- Greg

 

Cool, we have someone from the vendor itself.
Allow me a few questions/comments

As I understand, Diskeeper does free space consolidation too. Atleast it says so on the website.

http://www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/professional/features.asp

But it takes longer for that single pass than Diskeeper right? If one were to run DK a couple of times or more, with improved defragmentation with each pass would that not have the same effect, but in a (possibly) shorter time? I know for a fact that DK defrags very fast. In my unscientific tests before I bought DK, it defragged the fastest of the defraggers I 'tested'. I never tested this multi-pass thing, but DK defragged almost all my files the first time around itself; after that I have left it on auto.

You can, with DK too. Apart from the automode, there is a scheduler. The time control is coarser than PD, but ought to be sufficient for a scheduled job.

From my personal experience, I can attest that the diskeeper 'invisitasking' or whatever fancy name it goes by, works really well in this regard. It runs nicely in the background without screwing up other programs.

PD's ability to defragment multi-terabyte drives is definitely an advantage if users see such a need, no question about it.

Don't mean to nitpick, but in the real world, how many user have multi-TB volumes on their desktop systems? IIRC, DK desktop editions claim to be able to defrag a 768 GB volume, which I suppose is less than most people have. I can imagine a 1TB drive divided into smaller partitions....but running a whole 1 TB partition on your desktop would take forever to defrag.

Anyways, my laptop has only a tiny little 100GB drive only, and my home system has a total of only 410GB divided into smaller, more manageable partitions (6), so I am not one to speak on the subject.

 

Saying that you perform free space consolidation and doing it are two different things What statistics are provided by Diskeeper that indicate how fragmented free space is on the drive - none? Why is this information not available if they say that they do it?

How many passes will be required before Diskeeper has done the best job possible with your drive? Is there any way of telling? If there remains a significant amount of fragmentation after running Diskeeper, is it because you haven't run it enough times or has it finished and that's the best that it can do.

I could write a defragmenter that runs on a 100GB drive and finishes in 5 minutes - and have bragging rights for the "fastest defragmenter in the world". However, it only defragments a couple of files in that 5 minutes. Yeah - it's fast but what did it do? In the case of PerfectDisk, we not only defragment files, we also Smart Place them (including placing of boot files for faster boot performance) AND consolidate free space. If you look at the documentation for IFAAST, it states that it can take a week or more for the full benefit from IFAAST to be achieved (if any at all can be seen). What if you want to improve performance now - not wait for some unknown number of days or weeks?

Any well written defragmenter should not screw up other programs.

Invisitasking is a nice way of saying "consumes little system resources" - which is something that pretty much any 3rd party defragmenter can be configured to do. Interesting scenario. If all you use are idle resources and there are no idle resources (busy file server), how does defrag occur?

Yes Diskeeper workstation editions state that they support large drives. However, if you look at the description of their Terabyte Volume Engine (only available in their more expensive editions), it states TVE "is a specialized defragmentation engine for very large NTFS volumes (60GB and larger in size). The TVE is designed to effeciently handle volumes containing millions of files." While their standard versions state that they can handle large drives, it is implied that only TVE can handle them effeciently.

The good thing for users is that there are various defrag options available in the market. It sounds like you (as well as many others) are happy with your choice of Diskeeper. Same as with users of PerfectDisk (any many many customers who switched from Diskeeper to PerfectDisk).

- Greg

 

I ordered Vista biz 64. would there be preinstalled diskeeper in my laptop??
I never tried diskeeper before, but xp's defragment function sucks for sure.
I usually set defragement program on friday night and anti-virus on saterday night.
BTW, I usually turn off my current t40 only once a week......Am I too bad to it?