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 Post subject: Diskeeper, anyone?
PostPosted: Fri Mar 08, 2019 9:11 pm 
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Is anybody here using the current 'preventative' Diskeeper 'defragger', and if so, what are your thoughts about it?

I always used to have Diskeeper Pro up to Windows XP, and it used to be 1st rate. This new-fangled one sounds like a brilliant idea though, and I have the offer of a free spare 'seat' from a friend's business, who thinks it's great stuff - but then he's relying on his IT suppliers/maintenance people...

Still over-all I'm inclined to jump at the offer as have been considering it myself anyway as the built-in defragger in Win 10 is as shite as it's ever been and painfully slow.

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 Post subject: Re: Diskeeper, anyone?
PostPosted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 12:55 am 
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I used Diskeeper many years ago and I really liked it. These days, however, I only have a single HDD (all the rest are SSD/NVMe drives) and that one is only used for backup purposes.

The Windows defragger does a good enough job in the background (this is the issue with Microsoft implementing certain functionalities that were previously offered by 3rd party utilities into the OS - they're generally not very good, but because they are 'good enough' to most people, they end up killing the 3rd party utility anyway).

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 Post subject: Re: Diskeeper, anyone?
PostPosted: Sun Mar 10, 2019 8:56 pm 
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winstep wrote:
I used Diskeeper many years ago and I really liked it. These days, however, I only have a single HDD (all the rest are SSD/NVMe drives) and that one is only used for backup purposes.

The Windows defragger does a good enough job in the background (this is the issue with Microsoft implementing certain functionalities that were previously offered by 3rd party utilities into the OS - they're generally not very good, but because they are 'good enough' to most people, they end up killing the 3rd party utility anyway).

Oh, Diskeeper Pro up to the XP versions was absolutely brilliant. After that I lost track, but the current version has something new up its sleeve - it doesn't actually defrag after the event, it prevents fragmentation by forcing files to be written contiguously. Apparently has no neg impact on speeds and only pos one. Oh and it's also perfect for SSDs etc., which of course fragment just like any other storage medium.

As for MS implementing stuff previously provided by 3rd party s/w, yep, they certainly try... At least until XP (no idea if also later) MS used to license and include a cut-down, very basic version of Diskeeper with the OS. The current included defragger does seem to do the job, but my confidence in it is low so I'm very much inclined to take up the offer of the spare seat...

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 Post subject: Re: Diskeeper, anyone?
PostPosted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 11:08 am 
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nexter wrote:
Apparently has no neg impact on speeds and only pos one. Oh and it's also perfect for SSDs etc., which of course fragment just like any other storage medium.


I always shied away from defraging ssd I always thought it was bad for them.

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 Post subject: Re: Diskeeper, anyone?
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 8:51 pm 
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oOSGearOo wrote:
nexter wrote:
Apparently has no neg impact on speeds and only pos one. Oh and it's also perfect for SSDs etc., which of course fragment just like any other storage medium.


I always shied away from defraging ssd I always thought it was bad for them.

Well, yes, just as bad as it is for HDDs. It impacts on the total write ops the drive can reasonably be expected to sustain. As you'd expect really. OTOH, not defragging results in terribly fragmented files very quickly with (relatively) old-fashioned file systems like NTFS (the slightly later journaling type FSs are far less prone to it), which not only can slow down read and write speeds tremendously but also presents an increasing risk of damage to the file.

So, damned if you do, damned if you don't. ;) Of course, when you take into account the much reduced number of writes an SSD supports (over an HDD), that skews the equation a little bit... All the same, I defrag automatically once a week, more if the need arises. That's why the current Diskeeper seems so attractive in preventing fragmention in the first place - and it's specially written for SSDs apparently. Getting my license at the end of the week.

At the same time am tempted to get rid of the (500Gig) SSD in the laptop anyway and swapping for a 1 or 2TB HDD - I need more space as have too many virtual hard disks for VMs which I have to keep swapping to/from a USB drive, and also dual-booting a Linux system; plus, I can get a WD disk dirt cheap in a couple of months' time.

Anybody have any particular prefs for WD Blue or Black? Black seem much more hard-wearing, looking at the specs.

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 Post subject: Re: Diskeeper, anyone?
PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 2:43 am 
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Diskeeper's sweet - I'd even pay for it myself if I had to/could. Glad I got it for free, glad I got it, period. No more worries about fragmentation, it's sped up the SSD by a noticeable amount and external HDDs even more. Brilliant!

Definitely going to swap my 500GB SSD for a 1 or 2TB HDD though as soon as I can. Just can't make up my mind yet whether to go for WD Blue or Black, or even perhaps Seagate Pro. Someone elsewhere in the forums had good things to say about the latter IIRC? Had some Seacrate (as they used to be nicknamed on account of extreme noisiness and reliability issues at one time) Ultrawide SCSI disks once when I still ran SCSI systems and they were actually faster than a WD I had at the same time and almost as fast as the IBM ones I had then. ('Reassuringly expensive' the latter were, too, in those days!)

The extra speed of the SSD is nice, but the difference doesn't seem big enough to justify the cost of a 1 or 2TB one at around 4-6 times the price that I can get a HDD for (even if I could afford it), and the SSD can then go into the old AMD box.

And anyway even with the SSD now Windows 10 still boots/restarts less quickly than Windows 7 on my old AMD 64 X2 system. But that, and the overall slower performance, I gather may well be down to those darn Spectre etc. fixes. Even so, every Linux distro I've actually dual-booted is there almost instantly, and generally much faster. Settled now on Debian with (currently) LXDE desktop environment. Starts in less than 1/2Gig of RAM!

Reason for the change is I desperately need more drive space internally on the laptop as I intend to install a complete IDE under the Linux system and try and get back into a bit of coding (after all these years!) there.

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