Vopt

and PerfectDisk

GRC quote No. I wanted to let Jeffrey in Columbia know that it wasn’t a free one I mentioned, it was a good one that I mentioned. And actually I now have two favorites. I think I referred to Vopt. Vopt is very nice. It’s at Version 8 now. However, I’ve started using one called PerfectDisk. And I bought it because I was very impressed with it. It will do something that Vopt won’t, which is it will defrag the so-called metadata. What I was talking about just a minute ago when I was talking about the bitmaps and the directories and things, nothing is able to move those because those are locked by the system while the volume is in use. PerfectDisk is able to do a preboot defrag of those and, for example, to defrag your swap file, which is another area that cannot be moved around while you’re running the swap file, running on the drive with the swap file. So I like PerfectDisk, and I like Vopt. And I also wanted to remind people, we got a bunch of other questions about what was that thing that allows you to see where your drive has gone, or how much space….”
What I like is that, well, first of all, PerfectDisk does defrag the so-called metadata areas, which nothing else will do because it does it as a boot-time defrag, like a preboot defrag. But Vopt and Perfect Disk both do something else, and that is they look at the amount of use you’re giving to the data and arrange it for faster booting. So, and again, PerfectDisk does an even better job than Vopt, which is why I bought PerfectDisk even though I owned Vopt already. PerfectDisk looks at all the files that are used at boot time and moves them to the very front of the drive, and also looks at the frequency of use. Files you don’t use very often it puts next. Files you modify sometimes it puts in a big block after that. And then files that are being modified all the time it puts right next to the free area. The beauty of that is that it tends to centralize your fragmentation, which minimizes head activity, and it means that subsequent defrags run much more quickly because the files that are changing often are the ones that are getting fragmented, and they’re right next to the unused area in the drive, allowing them to be redefragged much more quickly. So it’s really my current favorite right now is PerfectDisk.