It’s not a secret that com­put­ers slow down with time. No mat­ter how fast they are at first, you will notice them becom­ing a lot slower just after a cou­ple of months of use. This can be hap­pen­ing because of badly frag­mented disks.

Hard disks are the slow­est part of a com­puter. That’s because they have mov­ing parts, unlike RAM and CPU. As you cre­ate doc­u­ments, browse the Inter­net and down­load stuff, files become scat­tered all over the hard drive. Frag­men­ta­tion can sig­nif­i­cantly slow down a hard drive, since it forces the read­ing head to move more. As a result your com­puter becomes slower and you even might start expe­ri­enc­ing freeze-​​ups and sys­tem crashes. That’s why it’s very impor­tant to keep the disks defragmented.

Win­dows has its own built-​​in defrag­men­ta­tion tool, but it’s very slow and often doesn’t do the job prop­erly. For­tu­nately, there are a lot of free alter­na­tives. Aus­log­ics Disk Defrag is a well-​​known and highly rec­om­mended defrag and disk opti­miza­tion util­ity. It’s fast, does a very good job, and has nice Win­dows 7 style interface.

Let’s have a look at its features:

1. Free Space Consolidation

Sim­ple defrag­men­ta­tion only defrags files and not free disk space. This means that free space is scat­tered all over the disk. When new files are cre­ated, Win­dows fills in those small free space frag­ments. The more frag­mented the free space is, the more frag­mented new files will be. Disk Defrag 3 con­sol­i­dates free space into a large con­tigu­ous block, so that there are no “holes”. This tech­nol­ogy effec­tively pre­vents file frag­men­ta­tion and speeds up disk access.

2. Sys­tem Files Smart Placement

Quite often Win­dows sys­tem files get placed all over the disk and end up mixed with other files. As a result Win­dows takes longer to access them. Disk Defrag 3 arranges sys­tem files by defrag­ment­ing and mov­ing them to the faster part of the disk. This improves over­all com­puter per­for­mance and makes your sys­tem run smoother.

3. Keep­ing the MFT Reserved Zone Clear

NTFS file sys­tem reserves about 12.5% of disk space for the MFT records (a place where infor­ma­tion about every file and direc­tory is stored). How­ever, when the rest of the disk space is get­ting low, the MFT Reserved Zone is used to store reg­u­lar files. This may lead to MFT frag­men­ta­tion, which will force HDD heads to move more and slow down data access. Disk Defrag 3 moves reg­u­lar files from the MFT Reserved Zone to the rest of the disk space, allow­ing NTFS to allo­cate con­tigu­ous space for the MFT records and pre­vent its fragmentation.

4. List of Frag­mented Files

Aus­log­ics Disk Defrag 3 cre­ates a list of all frag­mented files after per­form­ing disk analy­sis. Select­ing any file from the list will high­light its clus­ters’ loca­tion on the frag­men­ta­tion map. Selected files can be eas­ily defrag­mented or added to the ignore list.

5. Com­mand Line Option

Com­mand line fea­ture allows users to defrag­ment mul­ti­ple disks, spec­ify how much CPU should be used for defrag­men­ta­tion, and gen­er­ate detailed HTML logs.  A com­pre­hen­sive list of error codes is pro­vided, so that sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors can use the pro­gram in their automa­tion scripts.

Other fea­tures include options to inte­grate Disk Defrag into Win­dows Explorer con­text menu, run autode­frag­men­ta­tion when sys­tem goes idle, and min­i­mize the appli­ca­tion into the sys­tem tray.

Aus­log­ics Disk Defrag received awards from rep­utable web­sites like CNet, Majorgeeks, and Tucows, and lots of pos­i­tive user reviews. Run its defrag option once a week and its opti­miza­tion option once every other week to keep your hard dri­ves in top form.

Related posts:

1. Can Hard Drive Data Recov­ery Work on Any Disk Drives?
2. Speed­ing Up a Slow Computer
3. Hard Disk Defrag­men­ta­tion: How To Keep Your Hard Drive Healthy
4. Slow Com­puter? — Learn How to Speed it Up!
5. Com­puter Hard Dri­ves and Repair