Another year of March Madness is underway here in the United States - three weeks of college basketball excitement (for those of you outside the United States, think of the World Cup on a smaller scale). Little-known teams competing agains the well-known teams. Teams representing colleges known mainly for their academics versus teams from athletic powerhouses that also happen to teach their students in various curricula. And it gets really exciting when, as always happens, a big underdog upsets a heavy favorite.
Despite the upsets and excitement, in the end, the teams standing at the end of the tournament - the Final Four - are usually the top teams. Other elite teams may have fallen along the way, but there are enough standing at the end that are the cream of the crop. It all starts out with seedings in 4 regions -- a number 1 seed ("best" team) plays the 16th seed ("worst"), number 2 plays number 15, and so on.
So it is with defragmentation - you might get an upset here and there, but in the end, it comes down to performance.With that in mind, here's my defrag bracket breakdown...
Free space consolidation. This is a #16 seed versus a #1. Without consolidating free space, you're opening yourself up to repeated fragmentation, quicker refragmentation, and the need to defragment over and over, while consuming resources all the time. No upset here, it's Space Restoration Technology in a walk.
Background defragmentation. This is a 7-8 matchup - close! Maybe a few subtle differences, and StealthPatrol adds a few extras, but we're talking about defragmenting when a machine is idle. A defragmenter does it or does not.
Scheduling flexibility. Another 16-1 matchup - not even close. Full scheduling options for when background defragmenting is not an option (for example, large enterprises that will not allow their servers to defragment without a schedule) such as daily or weekly, screen saver scheduling, or background scheduling - complete flexibility and control. On the other side you have always on defragmenting - that's it, that's the choice.
Optimization. No "bracket buster" here. On one side you have a patented optimization scheme that optimizes the drive, consolidates free space and reduces the rate of fragmentation. Matched up is no optimization strategy, leading to a constant reshuffling of files and higher consumption of resources.
Single pass versus multi-pass. Well, this could be considered a toss-up, but not in my book. Years ago when my father used to tell me to clean up my room, he said "clean it all up and do it all now." If I did a half-baked job, I knew I was headed back to my room for some more cleanup. And again and again until I got it done. So I believe in the motto "once and done." But others don't.
There are other key matchups - product activation required versus no activation required, MFT file placement for improved performance versus no placement, defragmenting all NTFS metadata versus skipping metadata -- the list goes on and on.
My Final Four picks: North Carolina, Georgetown, Texas, UCLA
My Champion picks: North Carolina, PerfectDisk
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