I decided for the review that I would run a manual defrag of the drives – and Diskeeper advised me that even though it was useful that I should run Diskeeper in Automatic Defragmentation mode.
You can watch the progress.
And at the end of the process you can see the results. In my case, over 43,000 fragments were eliminated. Although it wasn’t a quick process!
There are a number of different options under Properites, including updates and upgrades.
You can also view logs of whatever has taken place.
And even view the history if that interests you – however, as before, the area to view the history is very small!
You can choose to view a specific area though from the drop-down list.
But you can choose to save the history information and view it later – which is what I did below.
Final Thoughts
Diskeeper 2011 HomeServer edition is a very easy to use product that once you have installed and configured to your personal preferences (if you choose) can be left to run in the background and forgotten about.
Thankfully the installation is so much simpler that previous versions, and if people follow the installation instructions, or the walk-through in this review, they will be fine.
I also liked that there was a lot of configuration that could be performed, if I wanted, or I could just leave it with the default settings and it would work perfectly fine.
Again, if you think back to the start of the article, I mentioned that there are two camps when it comes to defragmentation software. I am still convinced that defrag is a necessity on any computer. I didn’t notice any performance hit from running Diskeeper 2011 HomeServer edition, even when I performed the initial analysis and defragmentation which took quite a while, but as you saw in the review I had a lot of fragmentation!
There are lots of great new features and more than ever before you can just leave it running and doing it’s thing.
Overall I think Diskeeper 2011 is a great product and a must have for any Windows Home Server.
At the moment it will only be available for Windows Home Server V1 and not Windows Home Server 2011, although that will change later in the year after Windows Home Server 2011 is finally released.
Watch this space for V1 price and release information – all I will say is that it’s coming VERY soon!
For now though you can check out the Diskeeper website[box type=”info” style=”rounded” border=”full”]You can now download a 30 trial edition of Diskeeper 2011 – just click the link in the header above and don’t forget to tell them we sent you![/box]
So, can DiskKeeper finally perform a 100% defrag? I gave up on it years ago and switched to Raxco PerfectDisk since PerfectDisk can, and will do a 100% defrag – even on volumes with less than 10% (let alone less than 20%) free space. It may take longer, but it will do it!
The real time defragmenting sounds interesting too.
Then again, I think my next server will have have the system/database files on an SSD so fragmentation will be essentially moot for me. The days of needing to defragment are coming to an end (finally!).
Regarding your SSD comment, Diskeeper 2011 has an optional module called HyperFast that provides SSD optimisation. What out for a review of this in the next day or so.
I’ve used Diskeeper for years and it has always been able to do a “100% defrag” and it has no space limitations.
And it is the only defrag solution that prevents fragmentation.
Check out this Top 10 Review which did a side-by-side comparison of the best defrag programs around:
http://disk-defragmenter-software-review.toptenreviews.com/diskeeper-professional-review.html
Raxco PD took the bronze, while Diskeeper took the Gold (even though it was Diskeeper 2010 and PD was the latest version 11).
But hey, third place isn’t so bad….
As for me, I’ll stick with the best — I like Gold!
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You did an excellent job on this review — very thorough (I wish the “professional reviewers” some of the magazines use were as thorough as you — you should send this review to Maximum PC; you run circles artound their “reviews”!!)
All I can say is wait till you experience the full benefits of the automatic defrag and the fragmentation prevention features in the software!
Seriously, thanks for a very professinal and thorough review!
Your reaeders can get a free trial of this at http://www.diskeeper.com