Defrag your files with Perfect Disk

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Product: Perfect Disk Version 7.0
Website: WWW.RAXCO.COM
System Requirements: Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows XP
Price: $50 single workstation, $250 single server

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YOU DON'T NEED to buy a separate utility for defragmenting your hard drive because Windows XP has one inbuilt, right? That's where Raxco Software reckons you're wrong. It claims that its Perfect Disk does all sorts of things that the Microsoft inbuilt defragmentor can't do, and offers several advantages over that and over competing products too.

Features
The Perfect Disk defragger claims it offers Windows 2000 and Server 2003 certification by Microsoft, can defrag and consolidate space in a single pass, and can also cope with multi-terabyte configurations. It will also work with disks where there is five per cent of free space, can defrag metadata and system files, and allows network scheduling from either a server or a workstation. The program, it claims, will also consolidate NTFS directories. We decided to give it a whirr.

In addition to regular fragmentation, the program also offers other features including disk trending - letting you see how often a system gets fragmented, a command line interface for admins who use scriptings or other applications and auto updates.

Does it add up?
We tried Perfect Disk on a desktop machine and on our notebook. Once you've installed and fired up the program from the single CD, you're presented with a clean interface which allows you to analyse drives, defrag them, create a defrag schedule and connect to another network computer.

Before we set Perfect Disk the task of squishing up the 140GB drive in the desktop, we thought we'd run the XP utility to see what it had to say on the matter in hand.

After the usual whirring around, Microsoft said our disk didn't need defragmenting, so we fired up Perfect Disk 7.0 and selected the "Analyze" option. This produced a thoroughly different picture.

Our hard drive looked like a bathroom loofah, with holes here, there and everywhere. The legend on the left hand side of the Ementhaler drive describes what the colour codes mean - light blue files are infrequently changed, yellow files occasionally changed, and red files frequently changed. Other colour codes describe directory, boot and excluded files and metadata. Grey space represents used chunks, while white space represents free space.

After completing the analysis, the program produces stats for the drive(s) you're squeezing - as you can see from this screen shot, we had a fair bit to squish.

Rather than set to the defrag task straight away, we decided to set up a schedule for a time when even the INQ generally has a snooze and a snore - 2AM in the morning. The shot below shows that the defrag of the desktop took around an hour and a half to finish, and successfully arranged the drive so that everything was a whole heap neater.

The defrag of the notebook took a lot less time to finish, but the program didn't have to cope with 149GB.

So
And so, what does this mean? The world+dog knows that the speed a hard drive is accessed can be a considerable bottleneck for PCs. If you don't defrag your disks every so often, the files can be split up into hundreds or thousands of pieces and this will take its toll on other system resources.

If a hard drive is really clogged up and fragmented, this can become a significant overhead. Raxco says the inbuilt defragger in Windows XP needs at least 15 per cent free space to run - doesn't supply network scheduling, and only provides basic defragmentation. It can defrag most data files, but doesn't touch directories on FAT16 and FAT32 drives. Nor will it defrag hibernate and pagefile entries. In addition, Raxco claims, Perfect Disk will defrag data, directories, pagefile, hibernate and all metadata on NTFS drives. The ability to network schedule defrags is also a distinct plus.

If you are keen on keeping your system as fast as possible, Perfect Disk could be a useful tool for you. Given the amount of downloads, picture and video files people generally have on their drives, it may help to speed up your machine significantly. It does what it says on the box. If you'd like to do quite a little bit more than the bog standard XP defragger does, or need to operate across a network, this software could well be right up your street. µ