Disk Defragmenter Utility

As advanced as hard drives have become, one item they are not very good at is housekeeping, or maybe that should be drive keeping. When files are created, deleted, or modified it's almost a certainty they will become fragmented. Fragmented simply means the file is not stored in one place in its entirety, or what computer folks like to call a contiguous location. Different parts of the file are scattered across the hard disk in noncontiguous pieces. The more fragmented files there are on a drive, the more performance and reliability suffer as the drive heads have to search for all the pieces in different locations. The Disk Defragmenter Utility is designed to reorganize noncontiguous files into contiguous files and optimize their placement on the hard drive for increased reliability and performance.

Accessing Disk Defragmenter

Disk Defragmenter can be opened a number of different ways. The most common methods are listed below.

• Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Disk Defragmenter
• Start | Run | and type dfrg.msc in the Open line. Click OK
• Start | Administrative Tools | Computer Management. Expand Storage and select Disk Defragmenter

The first two methods take you to a standalone window containing Disk Defragmenter. The last method opens Microsoft Management Console and displays Disk Defragmenter as one of the snap-in modules. In all cases, a window similar to the one below will be displayed.

When Disk Defragmenter first opens (Fig. 01) you'll see a list of the hard drives displayed at the top of the screen. The Estimated Disk Usage Before Defragmentation and Estimated Disk Usage After Defragmentation will be blank until a drive is selected and the Analyze button is clicked. In the screen shot above, I've already analyzed the drives as evidenced by the Session Status showing as Analyzed and the Estimated Disk Usage Before Defragmentation area containing a graphical representation of the drive fragmentation.

After the Analyze button has been clicked and the process completes the window shown above (Fig. 02) opens with a brief recommendation of what action Disk Defragmenter thinks should be taken regarding the drive. It's important to note that this is just a recommendation based on the percentage of fragmented files to total files and doesn't prevent the drive from being defragmented if you feel it needs to be done and might improve system performance. If you want to go ahead and defragment without more information, click the Defragment button. If you're in agreement with their recommendation and don't want to defragment, click the Close button. Click the View Report button to view a more detailed drive analysis.

An Analysis Report contains quite a bit of additional information about the selected drive. The report shown above (Fig. 03) details the File Fragmentation status of drive WXP02-D. The top pane provides Volume information, and as you can see there are 3,851 fragmented files. This may not seem like many fragmented files, but consider that this is only a 20GB drive, which is very small by today's standards, and that 81% of the total drive space is currently unused. Look at the Average Fragments Per File number of 1.04 and this tells you that approximately 4% of the files on the drive are in two or more pieces. My experience has been that when this number reaches 1.05 the message in the quick analysis window (Fig. 02) will recommend defragmenting the drive. The bottom pane, Most Fragmented Files, lists the files in descending order that are the most fragmented.

In spite of the recommendation not to defragment this particular disk, I went ahead and clicked the Defragment button. The results of that choice are shown above (Fig. 04) in the Estimated Disk Usage After Defragmentation section. The graphical representation clearly shows that not only have the red lines depicting fragmented files been eliminated, many of the contiguous files indicated by the blue have been repositioned toward the beginning of the drive, reducing the amount of searching the drive heads have to do to locate a file. The drive in this example is not a system drive, nor does it have a paging file which would be indicated by the lime green Unmovable Files color.

After the defragmentation process completes, clicking the View Report button will bring up the Defragmentation Report (Fig. 05). It takes the exact same form as the Analysis Report (Fig. 03) but shows the post defragmentation results. The Total Files and Average File Size remain identical, but notice that Total Fragmented Files and Total Excess Fragments have been reduced to zero (0) and the Average Fragments Per File is now 1.00, indicating most or all of the files are contiguous. In addition, there are no files listed that did not defragment.

Additional Disk Defragmenter Notes

For the majority of users, the Disk Defragmenter Utility included with XP is sufficient to keep the hard drives in relatively good condition, but it's actually what is known as a Lite or slightly crippled version of Diskeeper, a product made by Executive Software. You may have noticed in Fig. 04 that even after the drive had been defragmented, there were still gaps showing where no files were shown as being present. What are these gaps and why weren't they eliminated by compacting the files to the beginning of the drive? It's due to limitations imposed by the Lite version of Diskeeper supplied with XP. I don't currently have Diskeeper installed, but look at the images below, created from PerfectDisk v5.0 by Raxco Software.

The top image is a drive analysis of the same drive that was used in the previous examples. The analysis was performed immediately after the drive was defragmented using Disk Defragmenter supplied with XP. Using the Legend shown below, we can see that there are a number of details supplied that flesh out the areas shown in Fig. 04 as being Free Space. In reality, this really isn't free space but is the MFT and MFT Zone.

Now look at the image directly below the Legend map. It shows the same drive after being defragmented with PerfectDisk. It shows the same blocks, but notice that a number of the different legend categories have been moved and optimized for even better drive performance. This is essentially the difference between the built in Disk Defragmenter and an upgraded disk defragmentation program. The more sophisticated programs allow you to optimize page files at reboot and a number of other options that are impossible with the stock offering.

Conclusion

If you're an average XP user the standard Disk Defragmenter utility will do a good job of keeping your drives defragmented and help to maintain peak system performance. If you are the type that wants to extract the best possible performance from a system, consider upgrading to one of the premium defragmenter products. Most o them have a free trial available that will showcase the best features each has to offer.

The important point is that whatever product you decide meets your level of need, it doesn't do a bit of good unless the drives are defragmented on a regular basis.  Make it a part of your regular system maintenance.