But another review of their products is not the reason for this post. I received a Christmas card from them this year and inside of it was a quote from L. Ron Hubbard, of Scientology fame. I thought it was quite odd to feature a quote from him inside a Xmas card and noted it on Twitter, saying something along the lines of “seriously thinking of ending my business with Diskeeper”.

Not long after a had a comment on said Tweet which informed me of a legal dispute with a former employee suing Diskeeper for forcing Scientology down his throat.

I really cannot stand the integration of church/religion and state or your place of employment. I do not care that it was a quote from the writer of this classic pile of crap or if it had been a quote from the Pope, or the Dalai Lama. Leave your preaching to your personal life.

So this ends my business relationship with Diskeeper. Time to find a new application to keep my disks unfragmented. Note: On home machines I like Defraggler

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.