Paid vs FREE Defrag PRograms

I am using Puran Defrag which allows ms to defragment my HDD and even the boot files, page file, and MFT.

So why would anyone pay for a Defrag program like O&O Defrag, Diskeeper, or PerfectDisk??

Can someone please explain to me?

Why are they so expensive? And each year they come up with a new update, and you have to pay an upgrade fee? That is a rip off I think.

And what am I missing if I only use Puran Defrag? I like Puran Defrag because it's the only free program that allows you to defrag the system files via a reboot including the boot, mft, and hibernation and pagefile.

I have a 500 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi HDD on my Notebook

 

Well I'm only familiar with diskkeeper buth I believe they offer more options like tuning or the velocity feature where they claim could defrag terabytes of data really fast etc...

but for typical home use I just use defraggler which is free as well.

 

Well I tried the Perfectdisk demo and PuranDefrag defrags all my partitions 50% faster...so I don't understand

 

Cant afford to waste cash on premium defrag software.
Defraggler suits my needs perfectly when i defrag my secondary or external HDD.

 

These are not technical answers but rather "I am fine with free software" kinda answers.

Could anyone shed some light on this with some details?

 

Faridy...If you have Win 7 it defrags in the background by default. Don't worry about other defrag programs. There is no evidence that they are any better.

 

the tiny bits that software could be better are not worth the money. some just love to buy snakeoil.

they can't do magic. no defragmentation can.

 

Unfortunately the last good test is from 2007: Insights and Rants: The Great Defrag Shootout: The Winners
Windows 7 and 8 do a very good job themselves.
If you want to try out some freeware I would suggest to have a look at:
https://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-disk-de-fragmenter.htm

 

As Posted Above!

 

Given that this is primarily a laptop site, this ought to be provided with a caveat that the background defragment is actually a "scheduled" defragment...furthermore, since most notebooks are either turned off or sleeping during the default defragment time, few notebook drives are ever defragmented--so, not worrying about it isn't quite the solution.

Now, as a rule, I think people who do defrag defragment WAY TOO much--they become obsessed with it if threads like this are any indication.

One of the things that paid for programs actually do accomplish is true background defragment--ie, they operate in the background while a user is working and the defrag service steals unused cpu cycles and drive time to degrag in the background (windows native defrag will actually do this, too if the scheduled defrag is done while the user is operating the computer). Windows will do it on schedule, the paid for programs will do it constantly.

Paid for defrag programs will also tell you that they more intelligently do this, as well as more intelligently place files when defragging.

It's worth noting that today's high speed drives with large memory cache's will operate far better even fragmented than old drives that had been defragged. Either way, if your computer is behaving slowly, you've probably got bigger problems on your hands than disk fragmentation.

Final note--and I cannot stress this enough-- don't defrag your ssd drives.

 

But paid programs claim to have something like Smart Placement where they not only place the files in contigous order, but actually put the most used files/apps at the beginning of the disk, do you think that this feature alone is worth paying for a paid defrag program?

What about PerfectDisk which claims that it supports SSD defrag via free space consolidation? what have you to say against that?

 

To answer your questions:

1) marginal improvement--you won't notice the difference. And windows already does this with the prefetch data. It comes down to whose choice of data placement is smarter, MS engineers or (software maker's engineers).

2) SSD drives have a finite number of read writes--defragging means moving fragments, reducing the number of read writes in a drives lifespan. Now, with todays better ssd drives, the number of read writes is in the multi-millions, but then we get to the second part of the equation.
--a)There is no discernible difference between reading a file from a solid state drive split into 100 parts no matter where the parts on the disk are. You don't have a head moving from one part of the ssd to another, you don't have a platter spinning..the data is as quckly retrieved from memory address 0x0000067b and it is from 0x000088a0.
--b)Today's smart SSD drives achieve their longer lifespan by using several tricks--the most relevent here is that the drive smartly places data on different parts of the drive to "spread" out the wear and tear. If you are constantly defragging the drive to consolidate data you are working against the drives own inner workings.

 

Windows Vista and newer automatically defragment in the background, like as posted above. Also, the way Vista and 7/8 make writes to the disk, it automatically tries to group pieces together in larger contiguous pieces. So even if you're notebook isn't on very often, it's likely not fragmented much at all. An excerpt from an article that I refer people to when talking about defragmenting...

There is a point after which combining fragmented pieces of files has no discernible benefit.

Take that quote and put it to memory. It's 100% true, and by the way Vista and 7/8 write to disk, completely defragmenting a drive will really have negligible performance enhancements. If you have platter based storage, just let Windows handle itself. I've found it's quite good at just that.

 

the ones who know best how to handle the os are the ones who a) build the os and b) have millions of use-cases that are logged and documented (trough optional automated anonymous customer feedback): microsoft

Disk Defragmentation – Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements

you can read up there.


and no, SSD defragmentation is 100% snake oil. even with the slight chance that they have found something that could be optimized, thanks to the way the ssd works you will not ever notice that difference.