Any recommendations for a fast defrag program

At the moment i am using Norton Speed disk to defrag my drives 2 x 200gb Seagate Barracudas. It takes about 10hrs to complete a defrag of approx 40gb of used disk space on each drive ( definitely slower after installing SP2).
I have tried Diskeeper 8 not any faster. I have tried windows xp defrag program definitely not any faster, does anybody know of any program that will defrag faster than the ones i have tried and an old question with modern drives do you really need to defrag as the amount of time to defrag must put extra wear on the drives ? and a fragmented drive does not seem to be any slower than a fragmented drive.
any help and comments welcome

 

You've got a problem that no defrag utility will fix. Diskeeper 8.0.xxx is generally considered one of the best utilities for defragging. The default one in XP is from the same company and licensed to Microsoft. But is only a basic version. Another good defragmentation utility is Raxco Software Perfect Disk 6.0. But using that won't fix your "slow" problem either.

You've done a full scandisk?
Have you with Diskeeper 8.0 done a boot time defrag?
How often do you defrag, and what is your fragmentation level after a defrag?
Have you done a second defrag immediately after?

Your problem looks to be a Windows problem unrelated to the ability of a defrag utility to do the job.

Have you uninstalled Norton Speed Disk?

Any other general speed issues when using the PC?

Before a defrag make sure you have done the following...

Clear Internet Temp, History and Cookie files.

Do a disk cleanup. R click you're drives in My Computer and go into the properties.

From disk cleanup, clean up system restore which will clear all but the most recent restore file.

Clear all that will delete from C:\Documents and Settings\your login\Local Settings\Temp folder.

Clear all from the Windows\Prefetch folder.

Do a search for the following files using this string *.old;*.bak;*.gid;*.tmp;*.dmp Delete these but leave them in your recycle bin till you're happy everythings working. I've never had a problem though, and use this string as part of my regular maintenance.

 

Hello alboy,

As Paul indicated, you may have larger issues than just defragging.

Thread on Norton, post #2 Christer's reply about Speed Stick and XP's defragger.

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=35933

Regards - Charles

 

It takes hours even on drive D: which has only backup files and even if i defrag almost straight after i have defragged it still takes hours again, approx 10% per hour on the Speed Disk readout, I should have also mentioned that i have tried O&O defrag as well. All the other programs seem to prefer a different arrangement for the files than that by SDisk,as SD will say a drive is 3% fragmented but say O&O will say the same drive is 68% fragmented.
If SD is running automatically in the background how do i stop it from running also is there anyway i can check to see if XP defrag is also running in the background ? maybe they are fighting each other in some way but i would have thought that Symantic would have allowed for this in the program setup.
As always thanks for all replies and suggestions

 

Check in the device manager under processes.
The earlier thread that Charles posted has some good info.
I still say get rid of speed disk if it can be uninstalled from Norton.

 

Hi

also is there anyway i can check to see if XP defrag is also running in the background ?

If theTask Schedular Service is enabled, its runninhg. As Christer wrote, short of disabling TS, can't stop it.

Can't tell you how to disable SD, I don't run Norton suites. But there has to be an option somewhere within Norton's control panel to do that.

Past this problem, if you want to run 3rd party defraggers, then run them in safe mode on a on-demand basis.

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Christer,

Just to be clear so next time I know what I'm talking about: Set the SpeedDisk Service to either disabled or manual. Is that XP's service?

Regards - Charles