Ultimate Defrag version 3

[maldo 5]

Hi I will like to know if any one have used the ultimate defrag.I like to used on my computer to keep all my files in order. But I dont know if that will afect the fsx.any advice will be apreciated

[MELKOR 5]

Save your money. The defrag that comes with Windows is more than sufficient.

[Turbine777 13]

Hi Fernando, I never used that one but I use O&O Defrag and it works great, has tons of defragging options and is about a day faster than the Windows version. Something about the windows version I hate, such as it takes forever, has no GUI or anyway to know what the hecks happening. Ever since Vista the defragger has been completely naked. O&O has a trial version also, so you can check it out before you buy.Good luck with your fragmentation :(

[Guest wims]

+1 for O&O. Fantastic defragger that is fast and has multiple different defrag strategies.

[MorsAbAlto 19]

I use O&O as well. It really makes a difference on not-so-high-end systems like mine.By all means download the trial version and see for yourself.

[isaiah 1]

O&O for me tooJerry Esajas

[Sawydz 4]

And me...

[Tabs 2,790]

Save your money. The defrag that comes with Windows is more than sufficient.

It's really not. The Windows defrag (which is actually a stripped down version of Diskeeper) pays no attention to a couple of pretty crucial things:1. Consolidation of free space. You can help eliminate future fragmentation by packing files in so that there's no holes between them. It doesn't do this, it's purely a defrag algorithm.2. Placement of files in sequential order and toward the outer edges of the disk. The sequential order thing actually helps a lot with FS because the terrain tiles and bgl's usually get read in a sequential manner as you fly along. Placing your FS files on the outer edges of the drive means they are read quicker too, due to the physical concept of angular momentum on the drive - a point on the outer edge of the disk travels a larger arc distance than a point at the inside edge does - therefore it's actually physically faster (distance = rate*time), despite the fact that the whole disk platter spins at the same overall rate.I tried the UD3 demo the other day by the way and I'm pretty impressed with how powerful it is - you can order files at the outer edge in any way you want - so you can put your FSX folder sorted by name first, followed by a different game etc. It's more powerful than O&O's Complete/NAME mode because you can actually have a different order of the root level folders, it doesn't have to be alphabetical. For example on my games drive, I actually put it right now in the order: Starcraft II, FSX, and then a bunch of my other games all based on which ones I'm spending more time playing right now - I want those to load the fastest. That's something you can't really do with O&O.

[Guest wims]

...I tried the UD3 demo the other day by the way and I'm pretty impressed with how powerful it is - you can order files at the outer edge in any way you want - so you can put your FSX folder sorted by name first, followed by a different game etc. It's more powerful than O&O's Complete/NAME mode because you can actually have a different order of the root level folders, it doesn't have to be alphabetical. For example on my games drive, I actually put it right now in the order: Starcraft II, FSX, and then a bunch of my other games all based on which ones I'm spending more time playing right now - I want those to load the fastest. That's something you can't really do with O&O.

You could possibly emulate that with O&O Complete/NAME by renaming the folders to say A-Starcraft, B-FSX, etc, then renaming them back after defraggin, but its of course not an elegant solution.

[Tabs 2,790]

You could possibly emulate that with O&O Complete/NAME by renaming the folders to say A-Starcraft, B-FSX, etc, then renaming them back after defraggin, but its of course not an elegant solution.

Yep, I've done that in the past - it can be a real pain though because if anything's running out of any of those folders, Windows won't let you rename them. I used to have to reboot in safe-mode to be able to rename a lot of things when I did that.The ideal thing, and I'm not sure why one of these defrag programs hasn't done it yet, would actually be the ability to specify an amount of contiguous free space to follow each folder - so with FSX you could reserve a few extra GB for future addons and stuff. With other games, you'd reserve some space so that patches would have space, When you have everything in a giant block the way O&O or UD do it, patching a game on Steam or something like that creates fragmented files because there's nowhere for the patched file to go but to the end of that block of data.

[Turbine777 13]

I use to have my fsx insall in a folder named aaafsx on my D:\ for speed. NEVER saw any difference at all. I think it would fall in the microseconds category at best. Seriously folks, if you honestly think it could save any note worthy time, you'll be majorly disappointed. I'll stick with O&O until it falls behind (important) times.

[Tabs 2,790]

Dan, I can definitely see a difference at the very least in the sim's load times when starting a flight if I have it on the outer edge vs. further in. Download a program called HDTach and bench your drive with it - it shows you exactly how the throughput drops off across the disk surface due to angular momentum. On my drive it's nearly double the speed on the outer edge as it is further in.The real permanent improvement for all of this is SSDs though - as soon as large SSDs get down to a reasonable price level, we'll all be like "Defrag? Oh yeah, I remember when we used to have to do that."

[Turbine777 13]

When typing My last post it made me laugh at how much I once was tied into my comps. Back in 1998 I paid $1000.00 for a Seagate 10k RPM 40gb Cheetah and another $400 on the Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI controller to use it haha. My point is also based on having good hardware. I think the main reason I defrag is for maintenance purposes and freeing up space. I certainly don't follow posts that say to weekly or monthly defrag just because I emptied my temporary internet folder haha (Maybe back in 98?). Unless I am seriously fragmented I can only see a difference in benchmarks. I look back at how much benchmarks I bought and all the hardware as well because I wanted better scores, hehe. I am very familiar with them most of them and think I own them all but now only use them after a new build for a system checkout type of thing.I guess I always have owned good enough hardware where my seek time and cache were just that great to where I honestly cannot "Visually" tell any difference at all. Only with benchmarks can I see a difference. Then again, I have normally spent my gaming life running top hardware as well as Raid 0 so perhaps I wouldn't see it unless as I mentioned, I was seriousssssllly fragmented, but it would really have to be like 80% fragged I think. I don't even bother with Raid anymore, not on my last couple builds anyway. I think I'm maturing to the point raid 1 is more important to me haha (mirroring - backup).You're right about the reminiscing when we're all using SSD's and other new technology. My godd, I remember paying $650 on a single stick of 256mb ECC Ram, lmao I remember worst but don't want to age myself talking about 64k :(.

[ronzie 21]

SDDs will still have sector layouts. While there is no need for mechanical movement considerations there I think would still be a need to stack sectors properly in clusters to get away from wasted space in sector mapping. I think SDDs still follow the standard virtual HD layout formats.I expect to try UD 3 this weekend after I image my drive.BTW on the Acronis forums there was a reference that sometime in 2011 minimum hardware HD sector size will be a few KB, as opposed to the current 512 byte size to ease efficiency and real estate for large capacity drives.

----------------snip--------------The real permanent improvement for all of this is SSDs though - as soon as large SSDs get down to a reasonable price level, we'll all be like "Defrag? Oh yeah, I remember when we used to have to do that."

[B748 0]

Hello Ryan,Could you please advise me for best method and steps to defrag with UD3 (best performance for FSX)?In my case I have 2 HDDs that my Windows and FSX are in separate Hard disk , also I expected one partition just for FSX.Thanks