O&O Defrag Professional Edition
Posted on: 11/23/2003 12:00 AM

Most of today’s performance talk revolves around CPU and graphics card performance and little is discussed about how optimizing disk I/O (Input/Output) can offer performance gains. In the world of performance, disk I/O is like the red headed step child. Defragging your hard drive can improve I/O performance by reorganizing the data on the platters in a more logical way. In Windows 2000™ and Windows XP™ there lies a very chopped down version of a popular defragmenting software package called Disk-Keeper and lets face it, it doesn’t do much in the face of optimizations and often takes several defrag runs to get any noticeable change (if you’re lucky). I would like to add that the full version of Disk-Keeper is quite nice and does much more than the “lite” version that Microsoft has slipped in there. This is where other utilities like O&O Defrag come into play.

Installing O&O is a piece of cake. The installer gives the typical options to run the application for all users or only the current profile. It also asks if you want it to be the default defragmenting software, which is a nice little feature considering the native Windowsв„ў defragger is rather weak. You may also opt to put a shortcut on the desktop. Uninstalling is a snap as well.
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Here’s a screen shot of my MFT (Master File Table) before the defragging process began. It’s important to take note that the MFT is the “index” of all your files on your hard-drive. A defragged MFT can offer performance gains in load times of folder views, applications and files. Note that the native Windowsä defragger doesn’t perform defragging on the MFT and as such offers little performance increase other than saving space.
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The first thing that I noticed with O&O when I loaded it up was a major hit in system performance. I pulled up the task monitor and noticed a hefty load on my CPU as seen in this screen shot.
At this time I hadn’t began the defragging process, I merely loaded up the application and was prompted with an automation wizard. The performance hit continued even at the main screen.

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O&O offers several different defrag options to optimize I/O performance:
В·Stealth: This method defragments all fragmented files and tries to consolidate them in order to optimize available free space.
В·Space: All fragmented files will be defragmented, and then placed into the free slots in which they fit. This maximizes contiguous free space.
В·Complete:
В В В В oAccess: Organizes according to last access time.
В В В  oModified: Organizes according to last modified time.
В В В  oName: Organizes alphabetically from beginning to end of partition.

I chose to run the Complete Access method. The total defrag time was reported as two hours and five minutes for an 180G RAID0 array that hadn’t been defragged in 4 months. Speaking of reports, O&O has a nice reporting feature that allows you to see a before and after report so you can compare the difference. You can also create a preview report of your drives current status.

O&O also has a scheduling feature with quite a few options, which obviously let you create automated defrag times. A very nice feature of O&O, which would be more popular for servers, is the Activity Guard option which allows you to schedule all the defrag events with the power of monitoring system performance while running in the background. It will adjust the resources allocated to O&O on the fly so as not to affect system performance while you work.
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In the end I noticed SIGNIFICANT gains in boot time of WindowsXPв„ў , load time of my applications, files and most importantly the loading of maps in Battlefield 1942: Desert Combat. O&O did a nice job on defragging the MFT as you can see in the following screen shot. Aside from the major CPU hit, O&O did a great job. <center>
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Score:<img src="http://www.majorgeeks.com/images/review/star.gif"><img src="http://www.majorgeeks.com/images/review/star.gif"><img src="http://www.majorgeeks.com/images/review/star.gif"><img src="http://www.majorgeeks.com/images/review/star.gif"> 4/5 Stars)

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