Kerkia

Background

Disk fragmentation occurs when the operating system cannot or will not allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file as a unit, but instead puts parts of it in gaps between other files (usually those gaps exist because they formerly held a file that the operating system has subsequently deleted or because the operating system allocated excess space for the file in the first place). Larger files and greater numbers of files also contribute to fragmentation and consequent performance loss. Defragmentation attempts to alleviate these problems. Defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Note: the above description is from Wikipedia.

Recommendation

One important note is that Windows does include a disk defragmentation utility. We find it lacks features and has an awful GUI in XP, it still lacks features in Vista, and is getting pretty good in Windows 7. We have not much tested the efficiency of this tool in Windows 7 however so cannot recommend it (yet?).

We recommend Auslogics Disk Defrag, a very powerful utility. It appears to be much faster than other similar tools yet does include all the optimization features you would also expect from such tool. The user interface is very easy to use whether for interactive or scheduled defragmentation.

From the same Auslogics team is a screen saver application which we like very much. It uses the same algorithm as the defragmentation utility and runs the defragmentation as part of the screen saver with progress information being then displayed as you would expect.

MyDefragUI has a lot of history and, while we don’t really recommend it, we have found that its optimization brings the best results. So some users may want to try it, even though it is a lot slower, has less functionality and has a user interface that is far from being as finished as our recommendation's.

Web links

Auslogics Disk Defrag

Web site: http://auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag

Download: http://auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download

Screen saver version / Web site: http://auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag-screen-saver

Screen saver version / Download: http://auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag-screen-saver/download

MyDefragGUI

Web site: http://www.mydefrag.net/

Download: http://mydefrag.8qm.de/#1 (first two lines for portable and installable versions respectively)