Benchmarks*: O&O Defrag Professional Edition 10.0.1634

O&O Defrag Professional Edition is a $44.95 product from Germany, and is well engineered, with a boot-time defrag, a configuration wizard, a screen saver, manual and automatic defrag options. You can find a review of version 10 and the results of the latest benchmarks, where it outperformed the best defrag that Windows could offer by 6.1%, and performed 25% better than a system with no defrag at all.
The graph shows O&O Defrag Professional Edition (ODP) in dark blue, and the results from Windows XP in light blue. The magenta lines refer to additional options available in ODP. The first test is at the bottom, and shorter lines mean faster times. After answering the setup wizard questions, ODP defaulted to its "SPACE" defrag option.

• "Basic XP" refers to the standard install, without Office 2007, so there are only 710 files to be tested.
• "Defrag" refers to the read times of the same 710 files, after several defrag passes using the ODP program, with no "Optimize Files" or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. A 3.2% performance improvement is measured, not as good as the WDD result.
  
• "Defrag+Auto" refers to the read time after enabling "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and the LAYOUT.INI option in ODP. An improvement of 23.0% is recorded, still slower than WDD.
  
• "XP+Auto" is the result obtained after enabling both "Optimize Files" and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running WDD, i.e. the best that Windows XP can manage.
  
• "Basic Office" refers to the read time of all 802 test files, where no defragmentation has been done whatsoever, after the installation of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional (Trial).
• "Full Defrag" refers to the read time of all 802 test files after several reboots and several passes using the ODP program, with no LAYOUT.INI or "Optimize Boot" options enabled, using the "SPACE" defrag option. A 32.3% performance improvement has been measured, the best result so far, and 6.1% better than "Office Auto" below.
• "Defrag+Boot" is the result obtained after enabling and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running ODP with LAYOUT.INI support enabled . This performance improvement of 29.9% is still 2.7% better than "Office Auto".
• "/Name" is the result obtained after enabling and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running ODP with the "COMPLETE/Name" defrag option. This performance improvement of 31.3% is 4.8% better than "Office Auto".
• "/Modified" is the result obtained after enabling and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running ODP with the "COMPLETE/Modified" defrag option. This performance improvement of 28.0% is about the same as "Office Auto".
• "/Access" is the result obtained after enabling and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running ODP with the "COMPLETE/Name" defrag option. This performance improvement of 29.7% is 2.5% better than "Office Auto".
• "Office Auto" is the result obtained by allowing Windows XP to do its own defrag after enabling both "Optimize Files" and "Optimize Boot" functions.

The performance improvement ranges between 3% and 32%, with mixed results obtained when the built-in Windows functions are employed; "Optimize Boot" is enabled by default. Still, an average 25.3% performance improvement over no defrag at all is pretty good, and a 6.1% improvement over WDD is what one would expect from a third party application. I get the feeling that as the drive gets fuller, the difference between ODP and WDD performance will increase, as the abilities of O&O Defrag become more apparent.

*See: Benchmarks*: Why the Asterisk?