Defragging could save the planet

What about the energy used in defragging? Does this tip up in the power efficiency calculations? As far as I note, when defragging, my HD is pretty damn active for quite a long time.

While some efficiency could be realized, I think this is really a case of being penny wise and pound foolish.

A better option might be just to avoid the Windows OS that is doing the fragmenting. Linux, for example, doesn't seem to fragment its drives to death using EXT3 as does Windows (NTFS). It is also free. Linux servers run for years without problems. OSX is also less susceptible to fragmentation than Windows (but apparently HFS is more so than are Linux filesystems). I am not sure about the new ZFS system that OSX may be using in the future, but I think that it is very resistant to fragmentation as well.

And this wonder software costs just what? 50USD?

As an unaffiliated party with no links to that company nor the inq or its owners I'd like to point out that I heard good things in the past about diskkeeper from somewhat critical people that don't just call everything great.
Just mentioning because the inq does these advertisement articles sometimes and some companies come with fake studies to get in the press.

Taken from the OCZ Core SSD page:-

"IMPORTANT NOTE: Solid State Drives DO NOT require defragmentation.It may decrease the lifespan of the drive."

So when Diskeeper or Vista automatically defrags your hard drive you are actually shortening it's lifespan, meaning more landfill and broken PC's.

I used Diskeeper 9 Pro 2 years ago at first I thought it was really good but after just using the inbuilt XP 1 for 3 months I was getting the same responce on my AMD 939 rig.

Diskeeper is just bloatware it's alright saying it can make HDD and PC more efficent but adding to more memory usage dosn't.

Any XP users out there stick with inbuilt XP defragger it does the job.

diskkeeper comes installed on every lenovo computer. EVERY ONE. It doesn't matter if you want it or not, you get it. It's a resource hog, and therefore, a piece of shit. You might save 5 grand in energy, but 100 people at 50 dollars an hour who waste an hour waiting for their pc over a year's time is 5 grand too.

Did Diskeeper include the energy actually used by their product in rearranging the disk contents? I would guess not, as that would definitely negatively impact the results.

If disk fragments are so bad, then why don't file system designers include mechanisms to keep it from happening in the first place? And yes, it's fairly straightforward to do.

I REALLY wish everyone would SHUT THE FUCK UP about going green!! OMG WE GET IT!! No, really we do. Save the planet. We understand the concept.

...they apprear to have forgot to tell you about the unexpected slow downs and lock up causes by this "background" defrag kicking in at the most unopertune moments!

.I ahve gone back to old scholl defragging procedures!

Since alternative operating systems such as OsX, FreeBSD, Linux and Unix does not get their file systems fragmented it would be better to switch to them.

"The company reckons this could translate into over $5,000 a year of energy savings for businesses"

I guess that's $5000 total saving if every company on the planet used it...

Just out of interest, did they measure the power consumption of the machine whilst it was defragging too?

Diskeeper is made by a company with links to Scientology and which provided the useless default Defragger in XP. The full product is hopeless, even the free JKDefrag is better, and PerfectDisk is miles better.

So first of all, I do not get people making comments on subjects they obviously don't know !!!!!!!!
When I hear that defragging shortens the lifespan of the hardware..... well, please let me know how it works out then ?????
In my company we have extended the lifespan of about 2 years....so you tell me what's right..
Anyway, going Green is a requireemnt now, so sorry if u don't like it but no choice there...

@Jonathan

A Solid State Drive is not a Hard Drive. However, your premise is correct: Any software that accesses your storage medium will shorten it's life span. Wear and Tear with use.

...that defragmenting is unnecessary. In some cases it puts MORE wear on a drive than a fragmented drive would otherwise receive. In addition, it ties up the computer for more time than it does while spending extra time accessing the fragments of the files.

I believe that defragging at recommended regularly scheduled sessions causes more wear on a drive than the actual "extra" work the drive has to do to access the many scattered parts of the relative few regularly used files on that drive. File access time savings is minimal unless we're talking about drives on a server that have files that are constantly being accessed and where time is of the essence such as a large forum database or a busy bittorrent tracker.

Consider a weekly (or any interval) defrag and the time saved accessing your usual applications and all their associated files on a defragmented drive vs. the time it takes to defrag that drive.

When we're talking about only a second or so (even less for a small file) up to a few seconds for very large files, then adding all that time up for your weekly "session" of app/file access, vs. the time it takes to defrag the entire drive, I see no savings. In fact, I believe it takes more time to defrag than to just keep on accessing those fragmented files.

I have never defragged my drives and see no performance loss and have had no drives fail before their time.

Hi all,

My name is Antonina Crimi and I’m the UK PR manager at Diskeeper Corporation.

I totally understand your doubts: Diskeeper’s ability to improve system performance is due to its InvisiTasking technology which allows it to eliminate fragmentation on in real time, automatically, without interfering with system performance or resources. 
In this way fragmentation never has a chance to interfere with the system. 

I would like to invite you to have a closer look at the white paper which the article refers to.
You can find an abstract at http://www.diskeepereurope.com/assets/whitepapers/going_green_with_diskeeper.pdf

Or the complete version at: http://www.3dprofessor.org/Reviews%20Folder%20Pages/DKGreen/DKG1.htm


Feel free to contact me should you have any further questions.

Have a good day! 

I haven't had to manually defrag a disk in like 2 years.

Also, to all the Linux fanbois: Do you seriously think that anyone chooses an OS based on the fragmentation characteristics of its preferred file system? Sometimes I think you are all bots programmed to find Windows articles on the internets and post replies, "OMG Windoze is so lame if u used Linux X would never happen."

Now really people, most all commercial defraggers can do a scheduled defrag at the time you choose, or when your computer is idle for some time, plus you can just set it to not do it automatically but do it yourself from time to time.

Talking of schedules, how come no company simply uses window's own scheduler? that would be so much better than having 20 idle tasks running just waiting for a specific time taking up space while they do it.
They should simply enter a entry in the task scheduler of windows and there would be only one scheduler needed, plus the windows scheduler has a range of option on when to schedule things, daily, weekly, when the computer starts, when it closes, etc.
I think MS should get a guy to call every company that installs one of those scheduling tasks and point it out to them already.

I've been using Diskeeper 2008 for the past few months, and it's a slick bit of software. It defragments of all the drives in my rig quickly and invisibly in the background and my system always runs very smoothly.

I haven't checked power consumption patterns, and neither do I intend to, lol...I have better things to do. But for defragging, Diskeeper is simply awesome....so easy to use yet so powerful.

Diskeeper has a hell of a lot more licenses than that. In fact every Window's PC sold has a Diskeeper license because that's the underlying engine that Microsoft uses:

" The built in defragmenter in Windows 2000 and XP is based on a much older Diskeeper engine that was available at the time. The engine is much slower and it is also a manual and much less feature rich product. Diskeeper Corporation is a privately held company and Microsoft is not part owner. "

Why does every article about Windows have comments saying 'Use Linux'? You may love Linux but most of the world doesn't give a toss.

So, at face value, it saves 0.1Wh a day, or 20Wh a year, or $2 a year. Therefore, this POSoft takes 25 years to pay for itself.

I wonder if they have a defragmenting gimmick to improve the mileage of my car too... Not!

So nobody has independently verified this? Then I'm guessing it didnt' happen.

>> Since alternative operating systems such as OsX, FreeBSD, Linux and Unix does not get their file systems fragmented it would be better to switch to them.

Not quite. 

Unix file systems like ext2 and ext3 reduce the need for defragging by pre-allocating additional adjacent blocks when writing a file to disk, with those bocks being reclaimed by the O/S as required, which means that disk space allocation is nominally higher than the data size would otherwise suggest, essentially because it’s spread out more. This simply means that unix systems need to use more of the disk capacity before they start to fragment files, not that they are immune to fragmentation. Increase the %age disk use and do a lot of file creation and deletion, and a unix system will fragment its disk... it’s an unavoidable reality of block linkage systems. The standard unix solution to this is, backup and restore.

NTFS only allocates the blocks actually required at the time, which means that files become fragmented as they are modified.

In the days of expensive and scarce disk space, NTFS made sense where the computing budget was the critical factor and there was a need for partitioning of small disks. However, in the days of cheap and plentiful disk space, the compact allocation of NTFS, and its required periodic defragging, makes less sense. 

Against all of that, is the move toward Solid-State, which may well make the whole defrag argument moot... and simply eliminate file fragmentation as an issue to be concerned about.

Tried it last year for a while. No measurable performance difference on disk access after a week of use, but significantly slower startup. Took it off and have been bombarded with one or more emails from them every week for some time begging me to buy it. Their marketing people seem to be desperate this year.

Raxco is a better product in my experience - way better. 

The INQ seems to mention Disk Keeper often, but I do not recall seeing Perfect Disk mentioned of late (or ever).

Hmmm ... what doz it all mean?

Dweeb.

Jkdefrag is useless and perfectdisk is a resource hogging clunker. In fact all these defraggers that have to be scheduled for specific timeslots are obsolete and a total waste of time. Automatic defragmentation utilizing 'idle' resources is a far more efficient solution that doesn't involve wastage of time/manpower, particularly for large networks.