Now, please bear in mind that I wrote the articles some time ago, just didn’t post them yet. Since I wrote the previous article I have been reading up on disk defragmentation and have been trying at least a dozen defrag tools. A good place to find virtually every defragmentation program available today is ‘the great defrag shootout’. I say virtually because it isn’t hard to find a few more. Donn Edwards, the maintainer of the blog, does a decent job of describing the features of the different defrag tools. One nit, he seems to have a dislike for Diskeeper and it makes his reviews less reliable IMO. Well, doesn’t matter, it’s a blog so …
I tried many of the tools that are reviewed on this blog and these are my impressions:
– I personally hate set-and-forget type of tools because they tend to run always (as background task). Many installed always-running services and/or add systray icons. My systray gets stuffed enough as it is with necessary tools like my virus scanner. I virus scanner I want to run all the time, a defragger not.
– Another disadvantage of the set-and-forget type tools is that they go do stuff when I don’t want them to.
– Many of the tools were too much into details: I want a defrag tool defrags and optimizes my drives. I do not care if it didn’t succeed with 2 or 3 files. On many forums you’ll find plenty of posts of people who go through lists of fragmented/skipped files and have sleepless nights over 2 or 3 files that weren’t defragged or weren’t moved where they expected them to move.
– I do not care about the exact location of a specific file, you must be really bored to go hovering a disk map to see which file sits where. It appears many of the tools are designed for disk map fetishists. Due to lack of real features to add, adding gimmicks to the interface becomes an item where a defrag tool can separate itself from the rest it seems.
– I want to be able to quickly do a defrag while I am at lunch without going to have to start the program.
– I do not particularly care if a defrag tool is blazingly fast. I will not run it while I am working anyway. I want my PC to feel fast AFTER I have used the tool.
I did not find a tool that meets all those demands. So then why don’t you do it yourself huh?
Indeed. I decided to do a little research since I am aware if the fact that Windows offers what is commonly referred to as a ‘defrag API’ and all of the tools I was able to find claim to ‘use’ the defrag API I looked into this API. It turns out that getting the file system bitmap, a file bitmap and moving a file is in fact quite straight forward. So the first step was to write a simple tool that did just that. Since I do want to defrag one file, I added code to find all files and folders using the FindFirstFile and FindNext API. To learn if a file is fragmented or not, each file and folder is examine by getting the file bitmap for that file/folder. Putting this together took 10 – 20 hours (and I am a slow coder).
So, now I could examine a drive, gather up all fragmented files and defrag those. I did this in my spare time and decided to launch the idea of a free DIY DataRecovery.nl defragger at the office and got the go-ahead. Design goals: a simple to use run-on-demand disk defragger and optimizer. So I can now announce that DiskTune, the free disk defragger is in the pipeline. Stay tuned!
Note: I am aware of the fact that DiskTune was once the name for the McAffee defrag tool. However it appears they have abandoned it. Also, I can not find any online evidence for anyone claiming DiskTune as a trademark.
