Personally, I use Defraggler and find it fine. That said, I find I very rarely need to use it anymore. By keeping disk use below 50% on any given drive, fragmentation just does not seem to be an issue any more. I think the real trick is to ensure that you never use more then 40 or 50 percent of any given drive,

UT3 lets you put the most used or preferred applications in the best place for quickest access. You don't really need to restrict the use of disk capacity to achieve this. I think O&O does the same thing.Defragging and packing sectors within the disk clusters should make better use of hardware disk buffering and the software caching offered by the operating system.

Personally, I use Defraggler and find it fine. That said, I find I very rarely need to use it anymore. By keeping disk use below 50% on any given drive, fragmentation just does not seem to be an issue any more. I think the real trick is to ensure that you never use more then 40 or 50 percent of any given drive,

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

Use Folder/File Name mode, set a custom High Performance layout in Settings that places the FSX folder at the outer edge of the drive. Make sure "Strict Placement, sorted by: Default" is selected in the Settings as well, otherwise it may not sort things in file/folder order correctly. Hit Options and make sure Respect High Performance is checked.The simulation function is really nice for determining if your settings are actually going to work the way you want. Use that first, it only takes a few seconds and it'll show you what the drive will end up looking like after the actual defrag run.

Use Folder/File Name mode, set a custom High Performance layout in Settings that places the FSX folder at the outer edge of the drive. Make sure "Strict Placement, sorted by: Default" is selected in the Settings as well, otherwise it may not sort things in file/folder order correctly. Hit Options and make sure Respect High Performance is checked.The simulation function is really nice for determining if your settings are actually going to work the way you want. Use that first, it only takes a few seconds and it'll show you what the drive will end up looking like after the actual defrag run.

Thank you, I will defrag tonight , hope to report good result here soon :-)

I'm using this. http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/

I have the Ultimate Defrag 2008 and it´s great. You really can feel the difference on loading times.

I also have UT2008 and it is a very good program if you understand what you are doing with it. If you don't, I believe it can actually be counter-productive.I switched to Diskeeper 2010 because it constantly defrags the harddrive in realtime using idle memory. If needed, it can be shut off while using FSX, but I keep it running with no adverse effect. You don't even have to think about defragging anymore if you use it. Your harddrives are kept defragged automatically as needed.I checked it once with UT2008, which is also loaded on my machine, and it showed that Diskeeper was doing a fine job.Although I'm very satisfied with Diskeeper, I may try the new version of Ultimate Defrag to see if it is more intuitive (at least for me).

I may be wrong, but isn't the constant defrag of a hard drive a bad thing????

I would think the technical answer would be yes, but at the same time it would cut down overall work of the hard drive. It does cause the heads constant work while defragging, but then you compare that to cutting down load time and see which is more I guess. So defragging to death or just to do it I would think would add more wear. The MBTF (Mean time between failure) rating I think is measure only on the platter roatation mechanism.It still one of those things that probably would never go noticed though since everything would most likely balance itself out.

I am using PerfectDisk for quite some time. I tried O&O but I don't like so much.I thought someone from the PMDG dev is using PerfectDisk too but I don't remember who.Anyway I prefer PerfectDisk above O&O. Just my thoughts ...

<br />I would think the technical answer would be yes, but at the same time it would cut down overall work of the hard drive. It does cause the heads constant work while defragging, but then you compare that to cutting down load time and see which is more I guess. So defragging to death or just to do it I would think would add more wear. The MBTF (Mean time between failure) rating I think is measure only on the platter roatation mechanism.<br />It still one of those things that probably would never go noticed though since everything would most likely balance itself out.<br />

I would leave MTBF up to IEEE. :( Defraging once in a while is good, but in my humble opinion, doing so consistently will put wear on the drive. More so than just having a few files not near the edge of the platter.

I would leave MTBF up to IEEE. :( Defraging once in a while is good, but in my humble opinion, doing so consistently will put wear on the drive. More so than just having a few files not near the edge of the platter.

I've been using MyDefrag (http://www.mydefrag.com/) which is completely free and customizable, for quite a while. Comes with full range of profiles for different kind of data (System, Data). Does sorting, cleanup, analisys, etc.I must say I never had any problems with it and it does the job very well. Compared to Diskeeper 2008, which I was usins some time ago, it works much better.Cheers

I am using PerfectDisk for quite some time. I tried O&O but I don't like so much.I thought someone from the PMDG dev is using PerfectDisk too but I don't remember who.Anyway I prefer PerfectDisk above O&O. Just my thoughts ...

I used to use Perfect Disk solely for it's ability to completely defrag the NTFS metafiles, I'd run that (requires a reboot, it does it before Windows starts) and then I'd do an O&O Complete/NAME.UD3 handles the metadata fine now though so I'm just using that alone.--------Btw, I'm not sure I buy this talk that defragging puts "wear" on an HD. What would that be exactly? The platters are always spinning at the same rate when the drive is on, the read/write heads are pretty much always moving in normal operation within the OS, and the actual act of reading and writing data is a purely electronic process with charges...

"I'm not sure I buy this talk that defragging puts "wear" on an HD. What would that be exactly? The platters are always spinning..."Very true which is why I answered the way I did. I'm not sure how the MTBF is calculated but think it is the spinning and not the head work (or actuators). If it causes your drive to wake-up and power up to defrag or spin faster for defrags then it would be technically producing more wear and tear. Hard to answer questions in a forum sometime that you know certain people will be looking for exacts. Other than the technically possible, to me it is one of those things that just comes down to, do what you want and don't sweat the small stuff. Worrying about stupid crap like this (and in some cases defragging enough) is "Technically" a small amount of stress. Enjoy life, enjoy your toyz and pay more attention to our own MTBF :(

I used to use Perfect Disk solely for it's ability to completely defrag the NTFS metafiles, I'd run that (requires a reboot, it does it before Windows starts) and then I'd do an O&O Complete/NAME.UD3 handles the metadata fine now though so I'm just using that alone.--------Btw, I'm not sure I buy this talk that defragging puts "wear" on an HD. What would that be exactly? The platters are always spinning at the same rate when the drive is on, the read/write heads are pretty much always moving in normal operation within the OS, and the actual act of reading and writing data is a purely electronic process with charges...

MyDefrag also defragments metafiles - in fact the only thing all those applications can do with metafiles is to move normal files off the reserved area, and defragment MFT, making that area available for Windows only again.As to the wear of HD components, Windows caches most of the files required to run itself, thus reducing HD use, and that works well since Windows XP SP2, when M$ added prefetching. Reading from the disk is also quite optimised these days, with predictive reading and caching done inside the disk. Defragmentation as such is just adding to the wear, that would normally be reached later through normal operation of the disk. But, nothing to be really worried about. MTBF is not very specific on HDs (it's not just platter), as it's a measure of generic failure, which could also be just a Bad sector. MTBF isn't bound to every single HD. For example: 1000 drives was made in one go, and they have MTBF 100000hrs, and 1st drive failed after 1 hr of operation. That leaves us with ~100000hrs to the next probable failure, which could be the 100th drive or 999th drive. Novadays, drives have more specific data, e.g. Start/Stop cycles: ~300000, which means that if one turns it on and off twice a day, it may fail after 410 days. Or, NRE (non-recov. errors), e.g. 1 / 10^14, which means that Bad block may happen every 100TB.As a conclusion, I would agree not to worry about doing defragmentation, even every day, as we will never be able to predict failure, and mechanisms like Journaling in NTFS/ext* are there to prevent data loss.Cheers