September 23, 2007

diskeeper vs. perfectdisk, the neverending story

Both programs are well known and this diatribe is being going for years now.
So, to the question "which is beter?" the answer is "none".
Because neither program is perfect, or has everything I want.

I have used diskeeper since I learned that Microsoft licensed technologies from them for NT built-in defragmenter. That was enough to sell me off. If I can have a full version of something instead of the lite, I do.
Before that I used the excellent speeddisk of the defunct norton utilities, which was dead slow but good.

Why I like Diskeeper? Because it never failed me. Never a BSOD or some program or driver compatibility issue. I cannot say the same for the other programs (I tried em all) and expecially for PerfectDisk. When I first tried it on Vista 32 RC1 it welcomed me with an unbootable system after the first restart. I later discovered that the bios of the dual xeon motherboard had problems with any kind of virtual driver application and that PD8 did something similar. Roxio support wasn't able to replicate the program. So, on that machine, that now runs Vista32 RTM smootly, there is no perfectdisk and never will.

Why did I try perfectdisk if I liked diskeeper so much?
Because Diskeeper lacked two features that I consider essential:
1. consolidate free space option, not as default, but selectable by the user for manual defrag operation.
2. complete metadata defragmentation during offline defrag: at the moment it only defrags the pagefile, while windows system files are the ones that get fragmented more often.

If you google, you will find blogs, reviews and other more or less sponsored opinions why free space consolidation is unneeded or important. You should know my opinion on the matter, if you read this article up to this point.
And you ought to know also that I'm not paid by anyone to write this.

For the above reasons I have to use perfectdisk as companion defrag utility to periodically defrag ALL the metadata at boot. Fortunately on the more recent C2D machine has no problems with virtual drives and PD8 didnt provoke any BSOD.
At the contrary, it proved helpful telling me that two units needed a checkdisk. There were some unindexed files and that blocked PD from running a metadata offline defrag. Makes perfect sense and after i fixed that with chkdsk /r /f, it ran smoothly.

Anyway, I'm off to the weekly backup.

T*

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Buongiorno!