Susie Colon of our technical support team has just put together an article for our upcoming enewsletter, Raxco Connections, on the major differences between the Vista built-in defragmenter and PerfectDisk. I'm posting a few excerpts here.
Vista's built-in defragmenter interface has been simplified from previous versions. There is no longer a disk map, and fragmentation statistics are only accessible from the command line tool. There are a few built-in scheduling options, but only one schedule can be setup through the tool. If you schedule the built-in defragmenter to run automatically, then it will always tell you that performance is good - regardless if it is actually defragmenting the drive! No matter what the fragmentation level is! The progress indicator has also been removed. This prevents users from knowing the status of the defrag run.
There have been some improvements to the built-in's defragmentation ability, but not nearly enough to handle the demands of today's hard drives. Vista's built-in defragmenter can defragment files when there is plenty of contiguous free space, but as the drive fills up and the free space fragmentation is not addressed, more files are left fragmented, and as a result the performance of the drive deteriorates. Free space fragmentation can also speed up the rate of refragmentation, which causes the defragmenter to use more resources to defragment files.
Susie's article also points out what PerfectDisk gives you that Vista's defragger does not. And there's a lot...
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your comment and my apologies for the delay. We've got it fixed, along with some other changes, and are doing final testing. We hope to release the fix Tuesday.
Thanks,
Joe
Posted by: PerfectDisk | February 16, 2007 at 07:48 AM
Hurry up with the fix for the display issue already...
Posted by: Andrew | February 15, 2007 at 11:32 PM