xpacetrue

I understand that Quick Defrag is meant to be just that, a quick and dirty defrag that sorts out the worst of the problem in a short amount of time. And 'Defrag' is for a thorough job where time isn't much of a constraint, right? We can expect to leave it run overnight, right? That's acceptable. That's fine... in theory. Don't get me wrong: Most of the time, Defraggler works like a champ. Usually, it performs well and as swiftly as one can expect. Usually... But, in my personal experience with Defraggler Professional v2.22.995 (64-bit), it sometimes acts up. By that, I mean it occasionally takes far too long even defragging a bit over a hundred gigabytes on a roughly 420 GB partition (Western Digital Caviar Black 500 GB, internal, 7200 RPM). Specifically, it seems to hang on a particular block. But it's not a bad sector. And it's not even hanging. It's just stuck on that one block for 10 hours or more! I can tell that the program is running. At the bottom, left hand corner it displays the file it is currently analyzing or working on. And it is still going through files, albeit very, very slowly. What's more, I can tell that the files it is slowly going through are small. Indeed, many of them are .png image files, which it goes through at a rate of about 1 file per second. I can also tell that it only vary rarely writes to disk, spending the bulk of it's time constantly reading and analyzing. The way I see it: Sometimes Defraggler seems to try too hard to consolidate and fill up the remaining space in a block to the point that it seems to thoroughly analyze nearly all the files on the disk in order to find one that fits the space just perfectly. It's almost like it's trying to find a single puzzle piece to fit a puzzle the size of a football field and it is individually picking up and scrutinizing every puzzle piece (file) available. But there's such a thing as going overboard, is there not? While I have the patience to let Defraggler run overnight or even a bit longer, my patience is not infinite. Most recently, I had it defrag less than 127 GB out of a 420 GB partition. I started it in the evening and it gave an initial estimate of about 3.5 hours. But it became stuck on one block almost immediately. About 10 hours later, the estimate became 45 minutes, eventually becoming 30 minutes. And 14 hours later the estimate is still 30 minutes with no sign of finishing. My point: To avoid users like myself getting very frustrated at this - terminating the process prematurely and just relying on 'Quick Defrag' from now on - we desperately need a third option. That, or we need a checkbox somewhere in options to disable whatever behavior is causing it to get stuck on a single block for over 10 hours. Maybe users should be able to choose between "Quick Defrag", "Defrag Lite" and "Defrag Heavy"?

+1 for the suggestion. I do find the option to move files to the end of the drive, particularly large files and particularly since we can configure the minimum file size to move to the end. It is also handy that we can click on an individual sector and move individual files or chunks to the end. But it would be even handier if we had another option to move files to the beginning of the drive or to the free space closest to the beginning.