I downloaded a free trial of Diskeeper Premier, installed it accepting all the defaults. After installation I opened the program and analyzed my hard drive. Below are the screen shots of the file performance and structure.

One thing I noticed after starting Diskeeper is the application immediately began optimizing my hard drive. The automatic defragmentation is enabled by default. You will notice this by the amount of disk activity you hear and see if you have a disk activity LED on your tower. To speed the defragmentation process along I started a manual defrag. Below are the results of the manual defrag.

In addition to optimizing files, like UltraDefrag, Diskeeper also optimizes folders. It moves all the folders on your disk next to each other as seen above in the light blue areas. Even after completing the manual defrag I could hear my disk being optimized.

Next I scheduled a boot time defrag job to which will defragment your paging file and master file table. These two areas are only able to be degraged at startup as they are in use when booted into Windows. The results of the boot time degrag can be seen below.

The advanced features of automatic defrag, boot time defrag, etc come at a cost. Diskeeper Pro Premier will set you back $99.95USD. Quite pricey, but, the Home edition of Diskeeper is only $29.95USD & the Pro edition will set you back $49.95. So unless you have a massive amount of disk space to defrag, which most home users will not, the reasonably priced home edition will suit your needs. Or you can be like me and use the completely free Ultradefrag.

Earlier this month I showed you how to use the Open Source defragmentation application UltraDefrag.  On my system I changed the scheduled task to run every day instead of once a week.  Below is a screen shot of the results of this daily defrag.  

The results are impressive. Or are they?

In some of the lost comments from my how-to were in reference to Diskeeper.  I used this program at work on all my workstations and servers.  Aside from some headaches with the management application Diskeeper has been keeping the hard drives at work running smoothly since 2003.  To get an idea how good UltraDefrag is I plan on downloading a trail version of Diskeeper and analyzing my hard drive.  Check back for the results.