Customer Reviews

Diskeeper 7.0 Workstation

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been a user of Norton Utility Speedisk longer than some of you have been alive. I manage the IT department of a company that has laptop users that can't be away from their computers long enough for me to defrag them, so I thought I'd try Diskeeper because it defrags in the background.

Yes, the initial manual defragmentation is slower than Norton...BUT, it defragmented the drive on my laptop to 0.1% fragmentation, while Norton Speedisk never got below around 3%. Add to that the fact that I didn't have to exit out of any processes running in the background.

After doing the initial defragmentation, I set the Diskeeper to "Set it and forget it" and it works in the background. I don't notice any performance loss (running on Windows XP Pro). I'm using an eval copy (available from the company's web site) but I've ordered a 5-pack for my users.

Windows XP's built-in disk defragmenter was barely tolerable when I had three or four gigabytes of stuff on my hard drive. It was completely unbearable when this number grew to 32 GB. The utility would chug away for hours at a time, moving huge blocks of data here and there -- and moving them again the next time I ran it. There was no end to it! Clearly, I needed an alternative.

At work, on Windows NT, I've been using Diskeeper ever since Version 4, and have never had any major cause for complaint. So, after checking this page for reviews, I went ahead and ordered Version 7. The installation went very smoothly, and within half an hour I had both my internal C drive and my external FireWire drive, each with 32 GB, completely defragged. Great!

Diskeeper also works well on Zip disks, though I probably won't bother to defrag them all the time.

By default, Diskeeper's "Set It and Forget It" enables something called "Smart Scheduling", which basically allows Diskeeper to keep the disk reasonably defragmented while I work. This is particularly useful given that I don't leave my home computer up 24x7, so can't just schedule a defrag at 3 a.m. like I do at work. There is a priority form on the Action menu which gives "Set It and Forget It" the lowest priority, meaning that I shouldn't even notice it going, except for an occasional burst of drive activity.

At least, that's the way it's supposed to work.

I wasn't even fully aware of this feature for the first couple or three weeks -- until one evening I suddenly found myself completely unable to do anything. My computer was basically locked up while the drive churned furiously, for five, ten, twenty minutes! In the distance thunder rumbled ominously. While I have both a UPS and a surge protector, I prefer to have my machine turned off in a storm. Trying to abort Diskeeper probably wouldn't be too swift. Who knows what might get corrupted? Finish, already!

Well, eventually it did, and I went in and disabled the "Smart Scheduling" for each drive. As a result manual defrags now take somewhat longer than before, but still no more than five or ten minutes. Since I'm doing it when it's convenient for me, and I've long been in the habit of doing it manually at home at least once a week, I have no real complaints. I suppose I could go out to Executive Software's web site and look for a program update, but don't really see the need.

Another plus: I found Diskeeper's help pages to be very informative and clearly written. Among other things I learned that I no longer need to do those potentially risky boot-time directory consolidations, because Windows XP allows on-line directory defragmentation. While I've never had a problem with boot-time operations under previous versions of Diskeeper at work, the help pages do suggest backing up important data first. If my home computer crashes, I can't turn to the help desk to fix it. So it's good I can leave well enough alone.

All in all, Diskeeper 7 is plenty good enough for my needs, and well worth the money.

Never deal with a fragmented hard drive again! This software is excellent in keeping your hard drive(s) defragmented with no intervention. Just set it and forget it! You can schedule the degragmenting to occur automatically based on fragmentation or set to run at a specific time or run it manually. Also runs in Windows XP. In fact Windows XP comes with scaled down version of this product!

Diskeeper performs as promised though it is not consolidating the directories (at least visually). I have not had any problems with speed during the "Set It And Forget It" as long as the priority is set to low or lowest. I have not had any problems with inconsistent disk messages either. That might be due to physical problems with the disk. Windows does not deal with hardware problems real well sometimes.
As for the "built-in" defragmenter, it is a scaled back version of Diskeeper. Diskeeper was developed by a guy that worked on the original development of NTFS for Windows. Speedisk is an O.K. product but I'd use Diskeeper anyday.

Diskeeper was the first non-pre-installed defrag program I've ever used. Since I started my research about four months ago, I've tried several other types. All-in-all, diskeeper stands a head over the rest. It is faster, and much more thourough. My windows defrag utility took 2.5 hrs to defrag my drive, after one days use. Diskeeper takes 2 min after a weeks use. I must admit that though diskeeper is fast, it gets slower, and slightly less thourough (though still more so then windows defrag) when the volume is very full. After my computer reached around 90% full, the defrag took around 10 min, and left 2-20 files still fragmented, depending on how often i started using it. Still, it is an excellent program, and worth the price.

Many databases & dedicated search engines can bog down as files accumulate on your HDD(s) resulting in increased access time ... Diskeeper 7.0 really works to minimize file access time & increase productivity. Diskeeper is transparent & automatic, once installed.

Diskeeper is the best. My system was so slow before and when I installed and ran Diskeeper, the speed increase was amazing!

I made sure our IT guys at work put it on all our systems. Now we don't have to wait around for our systems - and I can get more done in less time.

Diskeeper may indeed be the best defrag utility ever, but it does have some highly frustrating attributes. Almost all of the automated features it has result in the computer being "taken over" by Diskeeper at the most inopportune times. Nothing like playing a game when suddenly Diskeeper decides its going to defrag the drive and zap almost 100% of the system resources for an undetermined period of time.

It works OK when defragging manually, but stear clear of any of its automatic or scheduled features!

Ok, I see here that this software is deemed by many to be fast. Not in my experience.

I have a fast enough PC (1.4ghz, Win 2000 Pro) and 200GB's of hard drive space spread over 4 drives which I regularly have to defrag for video work.

I also have 2 defragmenting tools. The first is Diskeeper 7.0 and the second is Norton Speedisk which is integrated into Norton Utilities. I have tried using Diskeeper on several occasions only to realise what a waste of time the program is.

In terms of defragmenting speed it's a poor second to Speedisk which blazes through any defrags and also optimizes my files according to the parameters I have chosen regarding their placement. It also allows multilple volumes to be defragmented simultaneously and allows me to set maximum memory usage, priority and event recording etc.

Boot time defrags are also possible with Speedisk if required.

As regards Diskeeper, despite having many features I believe it is needlessly bloated - as if it's features will somehow blind the user to it's ineffectiveness elsewhere.

When defragmenting my drives there is always the necessary 15% empty space available for Diskeeper to work with so this isn't even a factor in it's slowness. I also have it's priority set to 'highest' for both 'set it and forget it' and 'manual' defrags.

Quite why so many people believe it's fast I don't know. Compared with some second-rate utilities, perhaps it is.

However, compared with Norton Speedisk, it's simply slow. A colleage has had similarly poor results from Diskeeper and I've seen others both here and elsewhere who have too.

My advice would be to get Norton Speedisk as part of Norton Utilities and experience what a fast and fairly comprehensive defragmenting tool can do for your system.

Something like this is undoubtedly necessary, and Diskeeper MAY be the best available too, but it's buggy. The "set it and forget it" feature doesn't work at all; when an automatic defragmentation should begin, the program pops up a message saying it can't continue due to inconsistencies on the disk. The first two or three times this happened (this is on an XP Home system), I scheduled ChkDisk, rebooted, etc. But (a) there wasn't anything wrong with the disk, and (b) it didn't solve the problem with Diskeeper. Now, when I see that message, I open Diskeeper and start the defragmentation manually. Sometimes the program refuses to do a manually started defragmentation, saying there's an inconsistency; but there IS no inconsistency, and when I restart the defragmentation, it works just fine. In addition, directory consolidation does NOT put all the directories together, and it takes forever. The hard-drive is only 20% utilized, so don't start thinking of excuses for this!