Major Differences Between the Vista built-in Defragmenter and PerfectDisk

 

With the recent release of Vista, a few changes have come to the built-in defragmenter.

 

Vista's built-in defragmenter interface has been simplified from previous versions.  There is no longer a disk map, and fragmentation statistics are only accessible from the command line tool. There are a few built-in scheduling options, but only one schedule can be setup through the tool. If you schedule the built-in defragmenter to run automatically, then it will always tells you that performance is good - regardless if it is actually defragmenting the drive! No matter what the fragmentation level is! The progress indicator has also been removed. This prevents users from knowing the status of the defrag run.

 

PerfectDisk continues to provide a variety of unique features and benefits which address the needs of today's home, small business and enterprise computing environments. Just some of these are:

 

 

More features can be found at: http://www.raxco.com/products/perfectdisk2k/comparevista.cfm.

 

There have been some improvements to the built-in's defragmentation ability but not nearly enough to handle the demands of today's hard drives.

 

Vista's built in defragmenter can defragment files when there is plenty of contiguous free space, but as the drive fills up and the free space fragmentation is not addressed, more files are left fragmented, and as a result the performance of the drive deteriorates. Free space fragmentation can also speed up the rate of refragmentation, which causes the defragmenter to use more resources to defragment files.

 

PerfectDisk's patented SMART Placement strategy defragments all of your files, consolidates free space and optimizes the drive. This provides the most complete defragmentation possible in a single pass, slowing down the rate of refragmentation on your drive, and speeding up future defrag passes, which saves time and resources, and improves both read and write performance - giving you the best possible performance improvement for your drive.

 

One thing to always remember is the reason you are defragmenting - you recognize that fragmentation affects file system and drive performance.  With this in mind, you want to be sure that whichever defragmentation you use delivers the best possible performance. With PerfectDisk’s SMART Placement and Space Restoration Technology, you get the best possible performance. With the Vista built-in defragmenter, as with previous versions of Windows’ built-in solutions, your performance can suffer.