I've installed the latest-n-greatest defraggler on my win xp pro sp3 system.
Here are some comments.
1). The slowness of defragging is most likely due to defraggler trying to do
a "defrag and optimize" whereby it tries to compact files as tight as they will
go so that there is very little empty space between the files. Whereas when
I defrag the files from the "file list" it is very fast since it is only defragging
a known list of fragmented files and doesn't try to optimize the disk space usage.
Moreover, optimizing the files may look good, but it doesn't take very long
to start fragmenting the file system again since for the few data block that are
available/scattered within the defragged filesystem, any file stored will
put chunks of the file all over the disk and amongst the available data blocks.
Suggestions:
a). Give me a radio checkbox option for "defrag files" and another for "defrag
and optimize". This will will allow me to defrag my files for maximum speed and then
I can select the "defrag and optimize" occasionally when I have more time.
b ). Give me an option to defrag multiple drives at the same time on a single or multiple
core CPU. This will speed up my defragging. along with defragging FAT16/FAT32
filesystems besides NTFS ones on the Win95 thru Vista.
c). Give me an option to select which drives to defrag and at what time. This will use the
windows scheduler without me having to do it outside of defraggler.
d). Give me an option to run defraggler out of systray that utilizes a user setting as to
when to stop defragging based on cpu loading. This setting is a cpu load percentage so
that when it excedes it, it will pause defragging and start again when below this setting.
Thus the disk will be defragged in the background when the cpu is idle so the user
doesn't have to manually initiate it. An alternative is to defrag the disk whereby the
program is a service and a client interacts with the service to tell it what to do.
See dirms from dirms.com as an example. See IOBIT.com for the iobit defragger
as an example of cpu loading and systray defragging.
e). Give me an option to exclude files and certain files that excede a user specified file
size by using a sliding bar setting.
f). Give me an option to defrag on bootup vs. when I'm logged in and manually start
defragging. Note: The auto defrag based on cpu loading would be available too.
g). Give me an option to defrag removable drives such as USB and Zip drives and
recognize that the disk or flash disk is inserted or not.
h). Give me a user option to defrag and group files together based on their last access
time vs. current time. Note: Since most OS/program files are updated infrequently,
they will have very old access dates and once defragged they will be grouped together
on the disk thus require very little moving around on the disk. The same can be said
for file types such as dll, exe, com, inf, and other file types which change very little
vs. others such as .doc, xls, txt, tmp etc. ;thus, defrag based on file type grouping.
i). Give me the ability to defrag huge files (That is multi-gigabyte files of 20Gigs plus since they are
disk images) when the amount of free space on the disk drive they reside on is very small i.e. less
than five gigs. The defragging of the file can be done over time (multiple defrag runs) so that
over time the file is defragged. Perhaps defrag the file in-place. Currently I have this problem
whereby all defragging software quits saying there is not enough free space. My drive is 40 gigs
with a 25gig file and another of 10 gigs leaving 5 gigs free. Some defraggers work with at
least 1 percent of the disk drive available, but they don't specify the maximum filesize that
can be defragged under these circumstances. An option to do this is to use RAM Disk to
read in part of the file being defragged, defrag this portion and rewrite the defragged copy
to disk and then read the next data block in and repeat til the file is fully defragged.