Best 5 Free Disk Defragmenter To Make Your Computer Run Faster Than Ever
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Chee Seng. If you would like to contribute too, please contact me.
Defragging – sounds brutally technical. But for you, it translates to one thing – more speed. As hard disks get bigger, and the demands on them ever more pressing, the need to keep all that data flowing – smooth-as-silk – becomes ever more important.
Video data; music files; media-rich web content; these all need big chunks of your hard disk set specially aside. But for the best performance, those files really need to be placed in one long strip of your disk drive. The problem is, when Windows writes files to your disk, it tries to make the best use of disk space; not to assure lightning-quick disk reading speed.
So those files can get splattered all over the disk in fragments, which results in the slowing down of everything on your system. The solution is disk defragmentation – the regular running of a program to put those fragments back together. Which is better known as a disk defragger.
The good news is that, however technical defragging may sound, the tools to defrag your hard disk are often very simple to run. The better news is that many of the best defraggers are free – such as the following excellent disk defragmenters.
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Auslogics Disk Defrag
This is a strong contender for the top-spot in the ranks of free disk defraggers. Although it may lack the complex options of some other defrag tools, it is the core performance that Auslogics Disk Defrag gets so right.
The analysis and defragmentation proceeds at a very fast pace, and the results are displayed clearly. Users are shown the predicted performance improvements, which gives some useful feedback on why you’re defragging in the first place. As you’d expect, the defragging can be automated. But this is such a snappy tool, you could easily run during the day.
WinUtilities Free Disk Defragmenter
With this offering from YL Computing you get all the frag-fighting fundamentals – disk analysis, a suitably speedy defrag engine, and graphical displays of the defrag as-it-happens – but with some thoughtful innovations.
WinUtilities Free Disk Defragmenter also lets you apply some smarts to the process of re-assembling files. For example, you can choose to move large files, that are rarely read, into the slower parts of the disk – close to the spindle. Equally, you can flag that certain files should go to the faster outer-edges of the disk – or that some files should never be fragged in the first place.
A great tool, but one that unfortunately lacks a scheduler. That’s not so cool; once you’ve got your defragging needs perfectly set-up, you should ideally be able to just ‘fire-and-forget’.
MyDefrag
Back in the mists of time, there was JK Defrag, a command line tool for disk defragmentation – good for its time, but not what the average user want to be messing about with. But of late, the well-proven defrag algorithms of JK Defrag have been souped up, with a more modern front-end – and MyDefrag was born. But MyDefrag is more than just a dinosaur-defragger, bought into the modern age. It has some useful tricks up its sleeve too.
One of the more interesting is the claim to be able to optimize the boot-up times for Windows computers. It does this by analyzing the files that are loaded during the typically slow system start-up of Windows. As it defrags, it makes sure these files are placed in the fastest parts of your hard disk.
Tests show that the performance improvements are relatively modest. But given that a treacle-like boot-up is one of the most frustrating aspects of using a computer, MyDefrag could definitely earn it place on many a user’s hard drive on that basis alone.
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WinContig
While defragging is an important housekeeping function, it can be something of a hog on your time. Defragging your whole disk can put your system out of action, while those discontinuous files are put back together. Of course, you can schedule your defrag to happen in your downtime, but WinContig offers another option.
With this dapper little utility, you can choose to defrag just those files you are worried about; which means you can get on with using your computer, with no apparent hold-up. WinContig appears to work pretty fast at the defragging itself, too. The app is a little bare-boned, but installation is simple – just a copy-and-paste job after extracting from a compressed file.
Defraggler
This cute-sounding program from Piriform combines good performance, with a wealth of defrag options, graphs and reports on your hard drive. Since its first release, some three year’s ago, Defraggler (which is free but encourages donations) has kept with the times.
As more users make use of flash and USB drives, for a greater proportion of their storage, Defraggler has added the ability to defrag removable drives too. It is also something of an advanced user’s dream, with a programmable script engine opening up its rich functionality. But novices aren’t neglected – a set of standard scripts is bundled with Defraggler, and these work well enough for most day-to-day defragging.
As well as sorting your defragging chores, Piriform claims that this tool can optimize the performance of your hard drive. It does this by digging deep into the innards of the hard disk – displaying the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) status reports from the disk itself. This gives you info on things such as power use and temperature, as well as the more typical disk usage stats.
So, despite its fluffy name, Defraggler is a serious heavyweight disk improvement tool – and well deserves being near the top of your ‘try-out list’ of free disk defraggers.
Guest post: This article is written is by Chee Seng who is a student who’s currently sharing his passion for technology at Bestfreeonline.net.
Editor’s note: Which is your favorite disk defragmenter? Are we missing your favorite? Please add in comment.
