Friday, December 14, 2007

Benchmarks*: Puran Defrag 4.0

Puran Defrag 4.0 was released recently. You can find a review of version 3, and the test results are shown below. It's results are impressive, and much better than I expected, and better than version 3.
The graph shows Puran Defrag 4 (PD4) in dark blue, and the results from Windows XP in light blue. The first test is at the bottom, and shorter lines mean faster times.
  • "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 two defrag passes using the full PD4 boot time defrag, with no "Optimize Files" or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. A 17.3% performance improvement is measured.
  • "Defrag+Auto" refers to the read time after enabling both the "Optimize Boot" function in Windows, and then allowing Windows to optimise the placement of system files. After this a further boot time defrag is done, with no additional options. An improvement of 32.6% is recorded, 8.1% faster 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 times of the same 802 files, after a full boot time defrag with all options enabled, with no "Optimize Files" or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. A 27.6% performance improvement is measured, as good as the Office Auto result below..
  • "Full Defrag+Auto" refers to the read time after enabling both the "Optimize Boot" function in Windows, and then allowing Windows to move the system files around. After that a simple boot time defrag, with no additional options, was run. An improvement of 32.3% is recorded, 6.2% faster than WDD.
  • "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 17% and 32%, with an improvement when the boot optimize information is used.
An average 27.4% performance improvement over no defrag at all is excellent for a $24.95/$14.95 (special offer) commercial package, beating all the other "heavy hitter" commercial programs tested so far. In most cases it works as well as or better than the built-in windows defrag. It also has an optional automatic defrag that is really not intrusive at all, and some other useful features. The only thing "missing" is a file placement display. The picture at the top of this article is a composite of two "Analyse" screen shots, one taken after installing Office 2007, and the other taken after the final test, effectively showing before and after situations.
The next test candidate is UltraDefrag 1.2.3

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, is this "better" than JKDefrag?
I might check it out! :D!!

Anonymous said...

I used this program to defrag one partition before removing autocad. After i removed it (and it's + thousand files) i ran puran again and not only didn't defrag but reported that before and after there was no fragmented files. Of course others programs "found" fragmentation...

Donn Edwards said...

Try doing the full boot time defrag. it will tidy up the drive no problem.

Anonymous said...

Just bought a copy of this great program. It made my system faster than ever before. For me its the best defrag program I have ever used.

pepoluan said...

Now that PerfectDisk 2008 is out... I'm dying to have a shootout between PD2008 and Puran4.x :)

Ohhhh... the anxiety... :D

Donn Edwards said...

Interesting idea. I'll include PuranDefrag 4.5 in my comparison with DK2008 and PD2008.

In short: Puran has the best boot time defrag, except that you can't exclude files. PerfectDisk has the best automatic defrag, and Diskeeper is the most over-hyped, over-priced and under-performing program.

I bought PuranDefrag for my wife's Vista laptop, and it is working well. I'm using PD2008 on my laptop, with help from JkDefrag

Anonymous said...

Puran Defrag 4.5 is really interesting.
After I downloaded and ran, it crashed. So I emailed Puran. After a short while they emailed me back with the information that it's fixed and I can download. It was impressive.

GUI is minimalistic - you don't really trust it. It also works pretty poorly when there's very little free space. In such case PD2008 wins. But if you have enough space to let Puran run... I guess it can be even better than PD2008.

Unknown said...

Thank you for the great site.
I am interested in exactly what you mean when you say "Optimize Boot" in the benchmarks, does that mean running Bootvis or enabling the "Optimize Boot" registry key or something else? I'm quite interested in doing whatever it is as that seems to make a difference with all the defraggers.

Donn Edwards said...

The "Optimize Boot" option is a change in one of the Windows registry values (the default is 0):
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
\Windows\CurrentVersion\OptimalLayout]
"EnableAutoLayout"=1
You can set this using a simple registry file, or by using the "UnityPro Disk Idle Optimiser" program. This registry entry causes Windows XP to optimise the layout of regularly used program and system files only, not data, so it isn't quite the same as an automatic defrag. Also make sure the following registry key is set (the default is "Y")
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction]
"Enable"="Y"