Is my Windows Disk Defragmenter broken, or is it me?

December 26, 2004 4:24 PM

I ran the Windows Disk Defragmenter overnight on my hard drive, and it didn't really work. Fragmentation is still rampant, and clicking Analyze tells me that I should defragment the drive. Hmm, I thought I just did. Is there anything I can do, or does the Defrag tool just suck?
posted by punishinglemur to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Having had mixed results at best with Microsoft's stock defrag tool, I now use Vopt and am really happy with it. Free download, 30 day free trial period; maybe give this a shot?
posted by enrevanche at 4:31 PM on December 26, 2004

I usually only defrag after I boot into safe mode. Isn't as much contention with other apps that may be interfering with the defrag. I've also found it may take many passes to defrag completely. The good thing is that defrag finishes much faster in safe mode.
posted by white_devil at 4:31 PM on December 26, 2004

As white_devil says, fragmentation (particularly with low free space) often requires a few passes to do the job.

And it is true that although the built-in one in XP works well enough, there are others that do the job faster.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:03 PM on December 26, 2004

The defrag tool sucks. Vopt is good, but I've had best results with PerfectDisk.
posted by Jairus at 7:08 PM on December 26, 2004

As others have said, it sucks. My vote is for O&O Defrag, however it is costly. One of the neat things with it is the automatic defragmentation which means that all your drives are slowly defragged over time and all the time with no noticeable speed loss. Means that they are never more than a couple of percent fragmented however hard you work the drive.
posted by ralawrence at 4:18 AM on December 27, 2004

I can't believe it never occured to Microsoft to add an option in their built-in defrag utility to keep running until, say, 1% or less is defragged. The fact that it takes multiple manual iterations is completely unacceptable.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:01 PM on December 27, 2004 [1 favorite]

Whitney Family Defrag is tiny, free, and slow. :) However, you're free to continue using your computer while it does its work.

Does a much better job that the crippled Diskeeper built-in to Windows, and recently added a boot-time defrag option to optimize some of those files that you can't otherwise touch while the OS is running.
posted by xiojason at 1:27 PM on December 27, 2004