Review: Faster Disk Defragmentation With Auslogics
Don Bradbury tries an alternative to Vista's resource-hogging, ponderous and uninformative disk defragger
| Product | Disk Defrag |
|---|---|
| Company | Auslogics |
| Web | www.auslogics.com |
| Price | Free |
| We like | Fast, informative, adequately customisable, reliable |
| We don't like | BoostSpeed advert, no file/folder defrag option |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
The Microsoft provision for file and disk defragmentation in Windows Vista is not only laughably slow but also quite uninformative. It's also a resource hog by dragging on your disk drive(s) as they are being processed. Few things slow down your system quite like live disk defragmentation running in the background.
Yet leaving your files fragmented is one of the surest ways to degraded performance. Over time, as files are used and expanded, fragments are scattered all over the drive, the consequence being, of course, that the disk heads have a lot of work to do locating the parts of the fragmented files in order to read them. This is a sure way to finger-tapping boredom, not to mention insecurity because fragmented files are the easiest to corrupt and the most difficult to recover in the event of accidental deletion.
While Vista's own defragger works - after a fashion - as is often the case, alternative offerings work better. In the case of this Auslogics product, not only more informatively, but with greater user customisation and, most importantly, far quicker. Our main drive's 54.6GB primary partition contained 21.6GB of data and program files, all well used, yet a defragging run was completed in just 7minutes, Vista's defragger having been switched off long ago as being hopelessly slow.
Download and install
To download the installation file, go to www.auslogics.com, select the downloads page and then products and scroll down to Disk Defrag. Then opt to pull the 1.3MB installation file to your Desktop. Double-click it to begin the installation, and set your options as prompted by the Wizard. Select the drive or partition you want to defrag, and wait a little while for the preliminary report.
This shows the file system, the total disk or partition capacity, and the amount of used and free space, including the latter as a pie chart.
Usefully, there are options for you to set the CPU usage that you are willing to let loose on Disk Defrag, with four settings of low, normal, high, and highest. For ourselves, we prefer to carry out defragmentation while we do nothing else on the computer, so setting the highest CPU usage ensured the fastest defragmentation.
Here you can opt to automatically remove temporary files ahead of the defrag run if you choose, and also show any removable drives that are currently attached to your computer so that they can be defragged if required. They may be less used than the main drive but they can suffer from file fragmentation, too. For ourselves, though, we always run Vista's disk cleanup routine before running Defrag, so for us there was no point in asking it to delete the Temp files.
The General option for personal settings takes you to the Auslogics web site where you're offered a free scan for other system inefficiences; it gives you the chance to accept a paid-for download that might help, but you don't have to accept this of course. A little unobtrusive advertising of this sort is OK by us.
While defragmentation is running, there's a report of progress that you might appreciate:
This report maps the current state of the files on the drive in a graphical display, the progress to date, also the name of the file currently being processed, the clusters processed, and the running total of fragmented and defragmented files. The process can be paused or halted as occasion demands, and that's about all there is to it.
In conclusion
We found the Auslogics Disk Defrag program informative, thorough, reliable, and quick (while making sole use of our CPU). You can't ask much more of a disk defragmentation program than that. Anything else is bells and whistles, bloat, and potential trouble.
This program does not appear to pull all the files to the front end of the disk; it defrags them where they stand. We suppose that if a drive is fully compacted to the front of a disk, the files are the more easily fragmented next time they are used because there's nowhere for the new file fragments to go but into the free space. There are arguments for and against this rationale, but we prefer things the way Auslogics do it; it makes for a faster defrag and it's all that's needed.
Our advice is to switch off the Vista file defrag offering immediately as being a resource hog and slow. Install Auslogics' Disk Defrag and you'll never look back. At the end of a run you'll get a report of what's taken place and a statement on the current state of your files. That's all the reassurance you need.
