Speed up and Optimize Hard Drives with Auslogics Disk Defrag

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.