Diskeeper 10 Server Enterprise Edition

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

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More the amount of fragmented files on your disk, the longer and harder your hard drive has to slog to access data. Manually defragmenting each and every hard disk on the network is impractical. Diskeeper is an automatic disk de-fragmenter, which seeks to ease your pain. It has a feature called Smart Scheduling, through which it keeps track of the number of files moved every time it runs on each volume.

It schedules its operation based on the number of fragmented files it finds during each defragmentation cycle. If the number is high, it automatically schedules itself to run more often. Conversely, after each de-fragmentation process, it increases the time period before next defragmentation.

Diskeeper can keep a log of all events such as files moved during defragmentation, disk information, etc. You can also set the CPU priority, ie how much CPU resources the tool should use for defragmentation. Its Frag Shield feature lets you configure Master File Tables (MFT) and paging files to prevent them from being fragmented. Diskeeper Boot-Time Scheduler can be used to defragment these files.

The tool comes bundled with another feature called Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology (I-FAAST) that helps provide faster access to files. According to Diskeeper, when I-FAAST is enabled during defragmentation, it runs some inbuilt benchmarks on disk volumes to find their performance characteristics.

Then it monitors those volumes for file access frequency to determine which files were requested most often. Based on this information, the tool positions them for faster access later on.

Diskeeper is easy to configure and use. When we defragmented a server's disk (SCSI) drives, the CPU consumption didn't go beyond the 10 % mark. Moreover, we were able to comfortably work with defragmentation running in the background. The disk didn't slow down and the system performance was satisfactory as well.

Bottom Line: Diskeeper provides far more features than the Windows defragmentation utility. But given its high price, you might want to first evaluate your needs carefully before buying it.

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