defragger : Java Glossary

• fragmented files
• consolidate
• folder/file name
• recent (last accessed/last modified)
• volatility
• auto

• Pleasing 3D look. Visually this program stands head and shoulders above the competition. This was quite a surprise for me for a product coming from a company I was unfamiliar with.
• Your choice of many different colour schemes.
• It claims to defrag all system files including the MFT, though the trial version does not do that.
• It is very quick. When you watch it work, you can see is not using the usual flat-footed sequential algorithm.
• It has a mode called JetSmart which is disabled in the trial version. It suspect it is a more thorough defrag. The documentation is rather vague on what it is.
• It has a cute 3D animated puppy. Cute wears thin for me very quickly. The Microsoft paperclip gives me apoplexy when I can’t make it go away. You can’t configure the puppy off in the trial version. Abelssoft told me that you will be able to turn the puppy off in future registered versions.

• The trial version is so severely hobbled that I was not able to test any of the serious features, such as MFT defrag. I don’t own a copy of the registered program.
• It does not give you any control over how to place files, e.g. by last modified date, last access data, by directory/filename, or any sort of banding system.
• It defrags files, but it does not compact them to make all the space contiguous at the end. The Alelssoft people consider this an advantage. They figure compacting space “is a nightmare because if all files are stored next to each other then there is no space to grow. This means that your files will get fragmented very very fast again, which will slow down the read processes quickly.” Space compacting speeds things up for files that are not growing. I prefer the ability to try things out various ways and see which works best in my particular circumstance for each partition. I segregate stable files in their own partitions where space compaction does pay.
• All it is doing in the equivalent of a O&O stealth defrag, just defragging the most fragmented files without doing any repositioning of unfragmented files. When I compared my drive before and after, not all fragmented files were defragged, and it did not appear to move contiguous files to pull most commonly used files close to each other or move rarely used file to an attic.
• As the defrag progresses, it marks more and more squares “unmoveable”. The number of unmoveable clusters should be invariant. This may be a bug, or it may be a side effect of using such large display squares that cover so many clusters, e.g. caused by fragmented files being moved from a square containing an unmoveable cluster changing the status of the entire square to unmoveable.
• When it is done, it claims a partition is 100% defragmented when it is not, and I don’t mean the various unmoveable files.
• When it is done, it marks half the squares “used” and half as “contiguous”. Surely if the drive is 100% defragmented, all the “used” squares should be marked either “contiguous” or “unmoveable”. Maybe the labelling is at fault. Perhaps they mean “already contiguous” and “recently defragged”.

• It can move the MFT to the start of the disk, defrag it, compact it, and shrink it. This is the main reason to buy Paragon. None of the other defraggers handle this crucial task. You can use it just for this.
• It automatically checks disk integrity before defragging. Defragging a corrupted disk would just make matters much worse.
• It is thorough. All files are in the advertised order, without embedded empty space and fully defragged when it completes. It does not leave an empty cluster between directories for future growth.
• Defrags paging files at boot time and directories online.
• It has disk monopoly access mode to prevent the system from attempting to move already defragmented blocks.
• It will put directories at the beginning/end and sort files by size or in order by last modification date, but not last access date.
• It appears to defrag the log and journal files, absolutely everything.

• You can defrag only one partition at a time. You can’t give it a list to defrag and walk away. Further you have to defrag/move the MFT, and compact the MFT separately from defragging the files. If you have four partitions, you will need 16 reboots to defrag the files and compact and defrag the MFTs. It is not 24, because the MFTs automatically get defrags when you defrag the files in a partition. You have to babysit it. Other defraggers you can wind up and come back the next morning.
• It will not order files by last access date.
• The evaluation version would not touch my C: system NTFS partition. It says it is an unsupported partition type. Other defraggers have no trouble with it. I can’t see anything unusual about it. The Paragon support people said a byte in the partition table is wrong and needs to be manually patched. Tech support said to patch byte 0x26 to 0x80 in the boot sector, but I so far don’t have a tool that will let me do that. It is a fault in Acer computers. The purchased version does not have this problem.
• The boot time defragger sometimes just quietly terminates without an error message without doing any defragging.
• You can’t do anything else with the computer when it is defragging.
• You must reboot at the start and finish of each defrag. I was never able to get it to defrag online, except in safe mode. There was always some program using the partition.
• Every time you defrag you have to respecify the options: put directories at the end, do not sort by size, sort by ascending last access date. It forgets your previous settings.
• When you select the partition, the partitions are displayed showing the nested extended partition structure to scale, but they are not always labelled with drive letters. The display is further confused by showing Linux partitions and others it does not know how to defrag. It should just show a list of drive letters of defraggable partitions.
• The display during the defrag is just a progress bar. You have no idea what it is doing. You don’t know what file it is moving, or even which partition it is defragging.
• the time to finish has the alarming habit of getting bigger and bigger and freezing, instead of counting down at a steady pace. The program should estimate high, based on previous runs, and refine the estimated time to finish in such a way the time to finish always keeps getting smaller.
• The cluster display does not let you explore the disk. It tells you nothing about what is in the cluster or how it is being used.
• If you abort an operation in the GUI, you cannot start another. You have to exit and restart.
• The defrag display often says there are 2 MFT fragments, but when you go to defrag the MFT, it says there is only one and no defrag is necessary.
• It requires excessive hand-holding. It appears that it wants you to babysit it and hit space from time to time before it will get on with the next stage, but you can just let it sit for a while and eventually it starts up again on its own. It should be able to run unattended to defrag a group of partitions and shrink a group of MFTs. The boot time modules makes reference to a script, but I saw no documentation on how you might compose one.
• It is slow. I takes 3 hours to defrag my C: partition. Defrags on data partitions can be quite quick however.
• It has fast and safe modes. Fast mode does not guarantee your disk will be uncorrupted if there is a power failure. Further you can’t interrupt a defrag even with the esc key. This means you computer may be tied up 2 or 3 hours defragging a partition before you can use your computer again, no matter what. Fast mode is not particularly fast. In some circumstances it is slower. I would not recommend using it.
• The cluster display is misleading. It makes the disk look more fragmented than it really is.
• In general you must purchase new versions without any discount. You can get a discount, but you have to ask for it. Some there is a free update.
• The sort for the internal defrag pass is slow, possibly an O(n²) insertion sort, though not outrageously slow. It would be almost instantaneous with a 16-bit RadixSort.
• The offline display quickly scrolls offscreen before you can read it with no way to scroll back to read it.
• The person who translated the prompts and labels from German to English made many errors. I sent a list of them to Paragon, but they refused to correct them. The errors are still there several versions later.
• The scan of the list of files sometimes just goes into an endless loop.
• The UI is hopeless about feedback. You can never tell if a command took. There may be no response or indication for 5 minutes or more.
• The information it displays about partitions does not include how badly the MFT in fragmented either externally or internally, so you don’t know if you need to defragment/compact.
• I did not buy the upgrade to Paragon 2009 since it did not fix any of the problems I wrote them about. The new “fast” mode, the main feature of Paragon 2009, was no faster and it was dangerous and impossible to abort.
• I uninstalled the trial Paragon 2009 and reinstalled Paragon 2007. However, now, none of the boot-time features work.

It defrags metadata (NTFS alternate file forks), it defrags the hibernate file, it can defrag the page file even when there is no contiguous free space hole big enough to hold it and it does repositions MFT to the middle of the disk. I also suspect is prunes the size of the MFT, and may even internally tidy it.

You can configure aggressive space compaction, but oddly the option is ignored for space compaction defrags. It only works for SMARTPlacement defrags. It does not offer a full sort by last-access-date option. It places files in several rough bands.

Raxco says it holds a patent on the idea of file placement. This is prior art and I can prove it to anyone who needs to break the patent. I posted the idea years ago on BIX.

Their online store takes only credit cards, though they also sell through dealers. IT Pro Magazine gave it their 2008 editor’ choice award.

Advantages

• This is what I decided to buy for myself. Five magazines gave it awards.
• Comes from Germany. You can let it work in the background waking up whenever the system is idle to do a little defragging. You can tune the algorithm to use. You can tune it to sort files alphabetically, to order for fast read access (sorted by last access date, its most logical algorithm in my opinion) or fast write access, or to defrag with minimal resources. It sorts by ascending last access date. Ideally it should sort by descending last access date to put the most frequently accessed files on the fast outer tracks near the beginning of the partition. It supports FAT, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5, RAID, EFS. Works even on drives larger than a terabyte. It has a scheduler so you can run the defrags unattended. It is clever enough to queue up a request to defrag a partition on the same disk as one being defragged, but will optionally simultaneously defrag a separate physical disk.
• They take credit cards and PayPal.
• The Complete/ACCESS algorithm has some nice features:
  • After the first time, it is relatively quick. It moves a few files you have not used in a while to the active end of the disk, creating holes. Then it rapidly slides files down to fill the holes. Often it does not even need to touch the first half of the disk.
  • It optimally organises the files so that the ones you use most often are near the active end of the disk and the ones you hardly ever use are near the beginning, perfectly sorted. No other defragger does this. Others use approximate bands or base the sorting on last modified date rather than last accessed date. This is the key reason I chose O&O for my own use. For this to work properly, you must first turn on last-access date maintenance with the fsutil utility.
  • You can think of it like a house with well-designed many-layered storage for commonly-used items, rarely-used items and an attic. Getting rarely-used files off to the attic reduces clutter.
  • It is equally important to get files used together close to each other on disk as it is to get the fragments of a files. This algorithm does that.
• It defrags the hibernate file and the registry. It can even defrag the registry without a reboot.
• The tech people get back to me within hours.
• You can control it from the command line, e.g.:
  rem defrag with COMPlete ACCess : C: D: E: F: G:
  OODCMD /COMPACC:C,D,E,F,G
  It works faster and more reliably in this mode. It stops immediately when you ask it to, unlike the GUI interface.
• The main change with version 11 is the optional background continuous defrag.
• The ad copy for version 11 says it is “up to” (that weasel phrase beloved of ad copy writers), 50% faster and uses “up to” 20% less disk work space. If anything, it appears to be a little slower than version 10.
• In version 11 it is now easier to tell it running or not. If you watch the tray icon it changes from red animated (running) to yellow (paused) to green (stopped). This is backwards to the way you might expect, but it makes sense. Red implies danger — you don’t want to start up some big batch process while the defragger is active.

Disadvantages

• It is insolent. By that I mean when you click stop, usually it just ignores you, or does not stop for several minutes. Similarly if you ask it to tell you what file a given cluster represents, it won’t tell you for several minutes, if ever.
• It often simply stops without error message. Sometimes it starts by itself after a minute or so, but often it never recovers. You have to stop terminate it and restart. This is by far the most annoying feature, since when you leave it running, and come back hours later, you find it has not completed the work.
• When defragging the C: drive, it seems to restart from the beginning over and over. I have every other application I can think of that might be interfering turned off.
• It often crashes and freezes.
• When you enter the registration key, it will ask for three fields, your name, your company and your registration key. In my case, to make it work I had to enter my company name in both the name and company field. This is odd given that I gave them both my name and company name during purchase and did not specify if it was an individual or corporate purchase.
• It seems to be quite slow the first time out. Like most defraggers, it is using the official Windows NTFS defragger interface. On subsequent runs, it is reasonably quick. I choose to use the Complete/ACCESS algorithm. My machine was noticeably more spritely afterward, particularly program loads.
• The menu talks about a C:\Windows\Prefetch\layout.ini file to control file layout, but does not document it. The O&O tech people told me it only works in XP/W2K3/Vista. If you enable the layout.ini option, the files used by Windows mentioned in layout.ini will be placed near the beginning of the hard disk, in the order specified, to load them faster. The layout.ini file uses UTF-16 encoding. It is a Windows feature for all defraggers, not just O & O. It is just a list of files and directories in the optimal order for bootup.
• It is adequately fast for a 40 gig hard disk but is too slow for a 250 gig. It is a little too fussy, often going to a great deal of work for a very marginal improvement.
• The shaded colours used in the cluster display are all subtle variations on blue, and on top of that appear to be blended for blocks that have a mixture of types inside them. You can’t tell much. Turn off shading to give a clearer viewer. Even then the default colour scheme uses three very similar shades of blue. You can configure a more distinctive colour scheme by double clicking on the colour swatch in the legend. If there is no legend, you can turn it back on again under the View tab.
• It used to consolidate directory entries together. Now it does not. I wrote a utility called touchdirs part of the FileTimes package, to encourage it, that stamps all directories with the current time as the last access date. If you use COMPLETE/ACCESS this tends to clump all directory entries together. You must use this in conjuction with fsutil to enusure Vista manages file access timestamps.
• One of its best features in previous versions was the cluster inspector to see what file was at each spot on disk. It is very unresponsive under Vista, and using it will often crash the program. It seems to work only when the CPU is lightly loaded. O&O should bump the priority of its thread higher than the background defrag thread. Even in version 11, it often never responds.
• It does not completely compact the free space in one run, though version 11 is better than previous ones. Running several times with the SPACE option gradually compacts it. Especially on the C: drive, no matter how many times you run, it does not completely compact the space.
• It does not completely defrag the disk in a single run. See the features matrix below for files it never defrags. It takes many passes, alternating SPACE and ACCESS/COMPLETE and boot STEALTH defrag to get all the files defragged and the space consolidated. This make little practical difference to performance, but is annoying for someone like myself who also uses a defragger for compulsive aesthetic reasons. It may just be that files in use during the defrag bedevil it, but it seems more than that.
• Defrag does not work on W95/W98/Me/NT. It requires W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista.
• When using COMPLETE-Access mode, it works on the oldest files first, so if you abort the defrag, you don’t get any improvement. This is analogous to someone who starts his daily housecleaning by cleaning the attic.
• It is often hard to tell just where it is working on disk. If often appears to be hung when it is moving many small files. There is nothing flickering in the cluster display.
• Does not defrag metadata (NTFS alternate file forks), UsnJrnl or $bitmap.
• It will not defrag the page file unless there is a contiguous free space hole big enough to hold it.
• It does not defrag the MFT. It does not internally tidy or resize the registry, the MFT (Master File Table), the directory etc.
• When I tried to defrag a FAT32 C: partition in Win2K, it kept rebooting. It could however defrag a FAT32 D: partition in Win2K.
• It sometimes turns the machine off, suddenly, with no error message. I was able to correct the problem by running chkdsk (with automatically fix errors checked) on all drives. The problem turned out to be corrupted security descriptors.
• When running, the ribbon Start button is disabled, and when stopped the ribbon stop button is disabled. However, the same button is used for both pause and resume. There is no paused indicator on the ribbon. The screen looks the same whether it is running or paused. The pause button should turn into a resume button when it is paused.
• Version 11 has a hibernate mode. However, it is a toggle and there is on indicator to tell you the current state. Further, running commands like Launch don’t automatically bring it out of hibernation. It just fails without telling you why.
• Command line mode does not work at all for me in version 11.
• It considers even the old system volume information snapshots (shadow copies) to be exclusively locked. The help files report the bug in Vista that explains why these files cannot be safely defragged. In theory probably could be defragged at boot time.
• It stores the configuration in a binary file: C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\O&O\O&O Defrag\ocx\ocxdata.bin.
• The cluster display in version 11 is quite inaccurate. You discover this by examining the contents of the cluster. I suspect the background defrag engine and the display have a communication problem so that the display is not always updated. I think I will stick with version 10, if these problems are not corrected.
• With Version 11 and background defrag, a file mysteriously disappeared. I can’t be sure background defrag was the culprit, but I have since I have since turned it off.

Two different sets of utilities all on one CD, a W95/W98/Me and NT/W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista set. For windows, make sure you manually configure a swap file with Control Panel ⇒ System ⇒ Performance ⇒ Virtual Memory, otherwise SpeedDisk will keep restarting, fearing writes to the temporary swap file. It moves the swap file and directories. However under NT/W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista it does not move directory entries (on FAT partitions) and metadata files (on NTFS partitions). It leaves them where they are, calling them unmovable files, scattered across the drive. To defrag them, you would have to reformat the drive and reload the files, creating all the directory entries first.