I use diskeeper 7.0 and I have had some problems with lost or corrupt files. I have my system w/ raid level 1. I cannot directly attribute diskeeper to this problem but I have my ideas that it does contribute at least a little to the problem. I just do not use the boot time defragmenter as it HAS caused some problems....(!) But it is FAST at defragging files and such so I would reccommend it at your own discretion though. You may want to run a google search to see if anyone else has anything to say about diskeeper.

I personally would recomend O&O Defrag Pro.

Changed to it since migrated from NT to 2000 and then to XP.

Been user of Diskeeper in my NT days, and have lost a FEW gigabytes due issues with striped disk and hardware based RAID, at least for me.

HTH,

Luis

I got Diskeeper... and wish I didn't. The cheaper home version is basically a bow wow. It has a "feature" that automatically will start to defrag your drives on its on, without permission, without warning IF you don't set it up not too in advance. That means what you guessed, if it starts to start up on its own, and you happen to be rendering a video file, it will trash it and likely lock up your system forcing a cold reboot. To me, that's half-ass backwards, a good program NEVER starts up unless you preprogam it to.

Also it can be very slow. Sometimes it is fast, other times when the drive isn't that badly fragemented it takes forever for no apparent reason. Worse of all it does an often does an incomple job, not fully defraging the drive.

Lastly the tech support while helpful has a chip on their shoulder. They do not take well to pointing out such problems and treat you like a little kid that never turned on a computer before. To me that makes me see RED with my computer experience. All and all you can do better. I know I at one time I did recommend it. Not no more. You can do better.

I have found it very helpful to setup a partition on your hard driver of about 8G that is used solely for the rendered file. Start with this partition clean, render to DVD image to the partition and burn. For the next DVD, delete the files in the partition and you have no fragmentation.

You can use similar techniques for other situations where fragmentation is a concern.

There's absolutely no need to defragment before rendering. It's a total waste of time. The difference it makes in rendering speed probably isn't noticeable. The rendering process itself certainly isn't affected in the slightest by running it on a fragmented drive. All you're doing is wasting the time it takes to defragment, and risking needless damage to the read/write heads. Don't do it!

<end of rant>

If defragging is of any use at all, it's before capturing and printing to tape. These are two operations that may be adversely affected by drive access speed. Even then, with ATA100 or faster drives, fragmentation makes little or no difference.

Thanks for all the good poop!!!!

I guess if 3 out of 6 responses aren't real happy with diskkeeper, that cinches it for me. And I agree with the concept that you only need to defragment when you are doing tape, vcd or dvd (that's when you get the dreaded BlueScreen!!!) I will look into the O&O Defrag Pro and PerfectDisk products. Whatever works in an ME environment and is better than the MS defragger.

Thanks again to all,

TomG

Another "Disk degragmenter" negative is that it does a lousy job. If you ever run out of hard drive space (I mean *ever*) you can basically kiss off ever getting defragged again without a reformat. (You'll wind up running it again and again without noticeable improvement.) Plus it won't even operate if you have less than 15% hard drive space available.

No one mentioned Norton Utilities. It has a great defragging tool. Also, it will clean up your Window registry which fixes a lot of wierd problems. For an "always good for a laugh" activity, (1) fix the registry with norton, (2) install a Microsoft product, then (3) check the registry again :-)

I'm not a very good technical advisor but I can say I've been using Norton Speed Disk for a year or so now to defrag and it's been working very good ...

I have Norton Speeddisk but FWIT, I have less problems with PTT when I use the MS defragger than with Norton. The biggest complaint I have against MS is that it takes a long time to run. Norton goes faster but I have had the Bluescreen with it. I'm afraid not all defraggers are the same (although the objective should be!!) Go figure.

TomG

I beleive defragmenting will improve performance in playback to an external monitor