Everything mechanical requires maintenance at some point. You take your car in to get serviced according to it’s schedule, you get it’s oil and filters changed every 3000-6000 miles. Well the same applies to your computers hard drives.  Every so often you should defragment them.

When you install programs onto your hard drive, windows places the files according to free space available on your drive. This free space may not be contiguous, you may have a chunk of free space here, a chunk there so the operating system will install the program as best it can according to what is free and where.

Over time you will delete programs and this frees up that space however in doing so you eventually fragment your drive. This causes things to slow down as the heads on your drive have to travel further and lowers the expected life of your drive as well.

When you de-fragment your drive, the defragmentation program takes all the programs and puts them contiguously on our drive, speeding it up and at the same extending the life of your drive. It all puts all the free space on your drive together making it easier and quicker to install programs.

I’m a bit wary of defragmentation programs due to the wear it will cause on the drive however I do realize that it’s something that should be done and therefore every so often I will get out my favorite defragger and run it.

Raxco has just released their newest version of PerfectDisk 10, so I thought I’d give it a spin as I’ve not defragmented my drive in a while.  They have multiple versions for all the different types of computer uses out there, server, home, professional and I’m glad to see they also have a version specifically for Windows Home server, something I’ve just purchased recently and am still in the process of fully configuring.

PerfectDisk 10 is easy to install and has a small footprint (I’m running PerfectDisk 10 Professional for this review). During install you can set various options as to which drives you’d like it to scan (PerfectDisk 10 supports not only internal hard drives but also USB and Firewire drives as well as USB Flash drives).

Once installed you get an easy to use front end. After running the Analyze function you can see the state of a particular drive. As you can see from the above screen shot, my drive state isn’t the best in the word and does actually need defragging, so this is a perfect test for Raxcos’ new product.

After the analyzer has run it displays the results to you in various formats. The above screenshot shows the summery view. Below is the actual drive sector view.

There are lots of options at your fingertips including do not run when on battery power, the close behavior of the program, how aggressive you want it to scan etc. etc.

The actual time it takes to defrag your drive obviously depends on the size of your drive but also on how badly it is currently fragmented.

After defragging your drive(s) you PerfectDisk gives you various statistics including how much performance increase you’re likely to see.

So for the drive I just defragged I should see a roughly 40% increase.

PerfectDisk 10 does one thing and one thing only, it defrags your hard drive. However what it does it does extremely well, safely and you will notice an increase in your systems performance after using it if you have a badly fragmented drive.   For the price, nothing comes close. I would highly recommend that PerfectDisk 10 to anyone. I know that I will be using it.