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Third party defragmentation utilities: Worth the Hype?
4. The all in one solution
The most important feature offered by commercial utilities or defragmentation suites is completeness. Some important features to shop for are boot-time fragmentation, exclusion masks, scheduling, control over the priority of the defragmenter, and a variety of organizational options. I personally have used several suites from different companies and found two to be top notch. Mind you, I do not receive compensation from any of the following companies for this endorsement. Diskeeper from the Diskeeper corporation offers all of the features I mentioned above and does it at a reasonable price. Another good option is O&O Defrag by OO software. It is important to note that these suites provide not only tools at a fairly reasonable price, but also enterprise level support for all sizes of organizations and individuals. Typical these programs attempt to provide additional functionality that can not be found in free utilities. In my experience, I have not found the additional features to be of marginal value.
5. Conclusion
For the average user, I don't believe that $50 is worth the marginal performance gains that a third party solution provides when compared to the free alternatives above. For gamers and those with performance critical applications, it may be in your best interest to download a trial of one of the above solutions and see exactly what it brings to the (forgive my pun) game. On my personal boxes, that I use for software development and gaming, I've found that the free utilities are still enough for my purposes. Don't let that fact keep you from trying other solutions. When it comes down to it, the all in one solutions provide consistent performance and well designed interfaces, but do so for a price. Your needs will indicate if the price is right.
This is my first meaningful editorial on this site; if you have comments or questions, please feel free to contact me. The guys will make sure that I get any mail you direct to me.
Resources
- JkDefrag - http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/
- PageDefrag - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx
- Contig - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx
- Diskeeper - http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.asp
- O & O Defrag - http://www.oo-software.com/en/