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General discussion

Performance utility for measuring Hard Disk Performance?

by benedictkhoojr Oct 8, 2005 3:15PM PDT

I am about to make a decision on which Defragmenter to buy (either Diskeeper or Perfectdisk). How can i measure disk drive performace before/after using the trial version of each Defragger? Is there a small utility that i can download from the net or is there one within windows itself? Right now i am using PC Pitstop, and manually timing the bootup of XP with a stopwatch!

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3 Posts
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Odd request.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Oct 9, 2005 12:04AM PDT

I've yet to see this change disk performance. The transfer rate, seek time, spinup time and other performance times all remain constant before and after defragmenting.

I'd not bother and just use what defragmenter comes with the OS and then save the bucks.

-> Some owners don't know to flip the IDE channels to PIO, OK it and then go back to set it to DMA and OK it as the simple workaround to a Windows issue/bug. No fix is planned, but the workaround does work.

Bob

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My thoughts...
by John.Wilkinson Oct 9, 2005 1:30AM PDT

Personally, I don't think it matters that much which one you choose, as they are both quite good. While it would be nice to compare the exact performance of each yourself, that will be nearly impossible, as you'd have to have the exact same conditions for both runs. (You don't want to give on ean unfair advantage.) Thus, unless you plan on working your hard drive over, then cloning it to have two identical scenerios, there's little you can do. Raxo has posted a PDF of their website, located here, which compares the performance of PerfectDisk to Diskeeper. However, since it's not from a third-party it's probably biased, and they didn't follow one of the first rules of performance testing...always repeat to verify it wasn't a fluke. In my experience Diskeeper isn't as slow or ineffective as they indicate, but I haven't tried the latest versions. No matter which one you choose you'll be getting a great defragmenter that won PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award. (Both companies state that they were the ones who won the Editor's Choice Award as the best defragmenter on May 24, 2005!!)

Hope this helps,
John

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my mistake
by benedictkhoojr Oct 11, 2005 12:59AM PDT

Thanks guys, i guess it is kind of anal to try do something like that. My brother has tried both and said that with Diskeeper there was a noted performance increase which he didn't notice with PerfectDisk. He installed Diskeeper 1st tho and it was totally subjective.
Also, i can't remember which one but an independent study from a leading PC mag showed that Diskeeper had the edge over PerfectDisk which surprised me cos i truly believed what i read on the Raxco (PerfectDisk) website which was quite one sided as you would expect. They did have d White Papers to prove their claims tho. Bottom line... I'm still undecided!
Btw sorry i didn't mean Hard Disk performance would increase but overall system quickness.

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