UltimateDefrag 2008 Debate: I

Regular readers of this blog already know that I had an unfortunate spat with DiskTrix over their marketing emails. Since it was a genuine mistake I have removed the article. In the meantime I have had an interesting conversation with Robert Ferraro about UltimateDefrag, file placement, benchmarks and the like. I will include some extracts here, and hope to add some more soon. He writes:

"I just read your quick spiel on Defraggler before. You said that you’ve never come across a program that could analyze any faster than Defraggler.
"I am sorry but this is highly untrue….
"On a 500 Gb drive with 348 Gb and 405,001 files this is the result of my analyze:
Defraggler: 160 seconds
UltimateDefrag: 37 seconds
"We analyze a drive 432% faster than defraggler or in other words in 23% of the time – less than a quarter. When you minimize our display – we actually analyze that same drive in 33 seconds.
"I can assure you that with 3 years of perfecting our analysis routine – it’s as overhead free as you could get by all coding standards.
"Please note also that with UltimateDefrag – Fragmented Files Only (FFO) …. We can get you from program start to completely defragged much faster than Defraggler since we save all that time on analysis and you don’t need to select files manually. Of course one feature of UltimateDefrag is that we can defrag individual files or just all files in a folder for that matter. So while we have all of our advanced features – the most simple of all defrags – Fragmented Files Only – is there too.
"One “secret” about our Fragmented Files Only routine is that for this most basic of all defrag routines, our algorithm functions in the favor of promoting consolidation of free space. In FFO mode we defrag files in LCN order – meaning it finds the first fragmented file towards the outer tracks and puts it in the nearest available free space. If the space is now cleared then the next fragmented file, if it fits will be placed in an earlier space – so it’s always, where it can, tending towards the outer tracks and filling free space from outer to inner.
"There’s not much we haven’t thought about with our product – any true purist will see that our product does much much more than initially meets the eye and for defragging is as close to the holy grail for defragging as you can get. Our list of to-be-included features stands at around 86 more features to be added at this point."

In fairness to Defraggler, it is the quickest utility currently installed on my laptop, and I only have two 30GB partitions. I have noticed that it is slower on other drives. However my experience of UltimateDefrag 1.52 in June last year was not good: it took over 14 minutes to analyse my drive, because there was a large (>4GB) compressed file on the drive. I wrote to Robert about this, and was told to try various options, but he was unwilling to admit that this might be a problem. I plan to do some tests to see if the problem has been fixed.

Update: I obtained a license for UltimateDefrag 2008, and tried a quick test (see comment #1) on my Iomega 500GB external USB drive: I timed the "analyse" times (I ran each one twice, and used the second result) for the defrag programs currently installed on my laptop:

Program	"A"	"B"
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) for XP SP3	20.03	17.65
Defraggler 1.01.068 beta	23.17	36.50
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	26.53	176.56
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	44.81	34.68
JKDefrag 3.34	47.31	47.28
PC Magazine Defrag-A-File 1.1	53.56	49.09

UltraDefrag gave an error, and PuranDefrag doesn't have a separate "Analyse" option.
Column "A" refers to the analyse times (in seconds) of the drive with a several large files, including a 9GB data file. Column "B" refer to the analyse times with the same files, but an additional copy of the 9GB data file, this time stored as a compressed file, containing 123235 fragments.
This confirms the behaviour mentioned in the UD1.52 review, but not nearly as bad as before: 3 minutes compared to 14 minutes.

Update 2: I noticed during the tests above that some programs took longer to load than others, so I did some timing (see comment 1).

Program	load time (sec)
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) for XP SP3	<3
Defraggler 1.01.068 beta	<3
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	10
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	9
JKDefrag 3.34	N/A
PC Magazine Defrag-A-File 1.1	<3
Paint Shop Pro 8.10	8
Microsoft Word 2002	3
Microsoft Access 97	5
Microsoft Excel 2002	4
Microsoft Visual Basic Professional 6	9

These numbers are not particularly scientific, since it isn't easy to measure with any degree of accuracy, but it does confirm my feeling that UD2008 and PD2008 are larger, slower apps than the other smaller ones listed. Bigger is not always better.

Update 3: Rob (see comments) asked me to do the fragmented file test on my laptop drive. I couldn't manage the 9GB file because of space limitations, but did manage to create a 6GB file that was compressed, with 476,192 fragments. My timing results (not scientific) are shown here:

Program Analyse Times	mins:secs
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	1:01
JkDefrag 3.34	2:00
Defraggler 1.01.073 BETA	7:53
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	21:44

This is not a typo: UD2008 took nearly 22 minutes to analyse the drive. It takes 20 seconds to load the program on my machine, partly because it takes time to draw a picture of the drive.
As soon as I deleted the 6GB file, UD2008's load time dropped to 8 seconds, and the analyse speed dropped to 18 seconds.