Dev Blog

Well, I know this is a controversial subject, but I thought I’d share my views on it, following some work I’ve done over the past few months.

We’ve been experiencing fragmentation on some of our servers, and laptops, and we’ve been looking at potential solutions.

There appear to be three real options.

Option 1 – Windows Defrag tool.

This is a very early version of Diskeeper, and while it does a good job of sorting files out, it takes an age to run, and doesn’t do open files. Obviously, this is an issue for servers where the files are going to be open. However, it’s free, so there’s no license fee issue.

Option 2 – Diskeeper

Over the past few years, I’ve been a keen user of Diskeeper, which has served me well. However, from a server perspective, the license price is somewhat high. The intelligent background defrag process has kept my laptop drive at a low level of fragmentation, and this has minimal impact on the usage of the machine, from my perspective.

Option 3 – PerfectDisk

This was raised as a potential option by a colleague. It’s something that I’d not heard of before, but having tried it out, it seemed slower, and took many runs to get it to recognise that the disk was defragmented (to PerfectDisk’s satisfaction). It also has a significant impact on performance of the machine while I was using it. Finally, every time I booted the machine I got a message popping up, which was caused by the PerfectDisk boot time engine (whether it was set to run or not). This strikes me as being untidy, as Diskeeper has a boot time engine also, but doesn’t display messages unless it needs to run.

Conclusion

Desktops – I use Diskeeper, and it’s served me well, and will continue to do so.

Servers – I’d be inclined to use PerfectDisk (it does the job and has lower licence fees).

PS. this is my first blog posting using MS Live Writer