PerfectDisk – Best defrag software for IT admins

As an IT professional, you have probably debated whether defragmenting a hard disk really helps or not. I, for one, never defragmented my computer using the built in Windows tool or using a third-party program.

Then one day I read a post on a technical site that actually gathered data and statistics on several different defrag programs and followed it with an in-depth analysis. I was shocked to find that depending on how you use your computer, there can be a significant difference in speed after a defragment.

So I decided to test a few out myself and ended up choosing PerfectDisk as my main defrag software. I also tested out O&O Defrag Professional, which was highly recommended, but PerfectDisk worked better for my system.

I am currently running Windows XP Pro with two hard disks, one for the operating system and one for the page file and user data. I also realized during this test that it makes quite a bit of difference if you have everything loaded on one disk as compared to having two disks, which allows the operating system and other applications to not have to compete for the data on the same drive.

PerfectDisk works in the background and continually keeps your computer defragmented using their proprietary SMARTPlacement defragmenting process. Basically what it does is figure out which programs and files you use the most and then automatically organizes them for quicker retrieval by the OS.

You can choose from SMARTPlacement or you can have PerfectDisk consolidate free space or defrag only. I really like the consolidate free space option that allows you to get the largest chunk of contiguous free space possible.

Also, the Space Restoration Technology makes sure that all new files that are created are created contiguously. This is really useful if you have a server or machine running multiple virtual machines.

I currently have Virtual PC installed and once I removed all the file fragments and made the entire VHD file into a contiguous file, performance on the virtual PC increased markedly.

You can also defrag single files only using PerfectDisk. That’s handy if you have some really large files like videos, etc and just want to defrag those files.

You can also schedule defrags exactly when you want them, either daily, weekly, or longer. The nice thing about the Business edition of PerfectDisk is that you can centrally schedule defrags for all your client machines.

You can easily setup a schedule to run late at night to have all PC’s defragged and free space consolidated.

And PerfectDisk even can be used if you are running ESX, Hyper-V or VDI. They even have a version for Microsoft Exchange, which performs automatic maintenance on Exchange servers, consolidates and compacts Exchange Data Store and files.

Also, as far as I can tell, PerfectDisk does defrag the registry and page file. Note that this is not the same thing as cleaning the registry, which can speed things up also, but that’s a different topic. You can read my post here on the best free registry cleaners out there.

Overall, PerfeckDisk has made me a believer in defragmenting again and I think it will make a big difference if you are a heavy PC user. If you just browse the Internet and check email, it’s probably not worth the money. However, it’s great for IT environments. Enjoy!