Diskeeper's Dianetics Difficulties

It seems that Diskeeper is having legal hassles once again. According to the Wikipedia article, the German government kicked up a fuss in 2000 about the inclusion of Diskeeper's defrag program in Windows 2000, because of their concerns about the company's close connections with the Scientology organisation.

"Executive Software [now Diskeeper] CEO Craig Jensen is a member of the Church of Scientology and has claimed his employees are schooled in the principles of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
"Our staff is trained on these procedures," Jensen said in 1992. (Wired article)

Now a former CIO is suing Diskeeper because he claims he was fired for not participating in Scientology training. The legal papers are long, and Diskeeper has responded to them, so the case will be heard at some point. Scott Pilutik writes:

Alexander Godelman and Marc Le Shay, two Diskeeper employees (Godelman was CIO and Le Shay hired as the Automation Planning Officer) have filed a complaint in the Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that Scientology training was a condition of employment and that their refusal to participate led to their dismissal. According to the complaint, "[T]he working conditions and work environment at Diskeeper were inextricably intertwined with the Scientology religion such that a non-Scientologist cannot escape constant impositions of said religion."
When Godelman complained that these programs ran counter to his own religious belief (Judaism), former Diskeeper CEO and current Chairman Craig Jensen told Godelman that his attendance at the "training courses" was "not negotiable," adding that Godelman would become more intelligent and his personal life would "improve drastically." Jensen also warned Godelman to not "complain about the process" in emails, which Jensen feared would be "misconstrued" and/or "taken out of context." Le Shay was eventually fired after he refused to attend and participate in a course series entitled "Basic Study Manual" and after Godelman interceded on Le Shay's behalf, Godelman was also terminated.

The Daily Tech article states:

Diskeeper’s response seeks to black out Godelman and Le Shay’s request that the company “forever refrain from … requiring any employee, as a condition of employment, to study, adopt and/or apply the [Scientology-authored] ‘Hubbard Management Technology’ and/or the related ‘Hubbard Study Technology’ in the workplace.” The unusual request is justified by the company’s First Amendment rights, of which it argues that injunctions prohibiting religious practice in the workplace are unconstitutional.

Coincidentally, (or is it synchronistically?) I was doing research on Wikipedia about "vexatious litigation" (in connection with my own case), and discovered that one of the most notable vexatious litigants is the Church of Scientology:

"Plaintiffs (Scientologists) have abused the federal court system by using it, inter alia, to destroy their opponents, rather than to resolve an actual dispute over trademark law or any other legal matter. This constitutes 'extraordinary, malicious, wanton and oppressive conduct.' As such, this case qualifies as an 'exceptional case' and fees should be awarded pursuant to the Lanham Act ... It is abundantly clear that plaintiffs sought to harass the individual defendants and destroy the church defendants through massive over-litigation and other highly questionable litigation tactics. The Special Master has never seen a more glaring example of bad faith litigation than this."

I just hope that Diskeeper has the good business sense not to employ the same lawyers and tactics that Scientologists have used in the past. They are not getting much good publicity from this case, and some of the reactions on Twitter have been somewhat hostile, with people saying that they are uninstalling the software because of this case. Personally, I can think of better reasons for uninstalling the software, including the company's over-reliance on HYPE to sell its products, and the misleading impressions created by their marketing.
I plan to do a proper review of Diskeeper 2009, along with its competitors. This is partly inspired by a June article in MaximumPC called "The Disk Defrag Difference", in which they cite "negligible performance gains" for 3 defrag products, based on the PCMark Vantage benchmarks. I think their choice of benchmark determined their conclusions, so I plan on using several benchmarks and tests on my new test PC, FRAGG.

Diskeeper 2008 Horror Story?

I received an email from "Zaphod", who told me of his experience with Diskeeper 2008 on Windows XP SP2 and a 105GB hard drive with 85GB free. Before he installed Diskeeper Professional 2008 trial edition he ran the built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) and obtained the following drive defragmentation:
It isn't great, but not bad either, so he decided to "improve" the defrag by installing Diskeeper. After running it for some time he was horrified by the result, shown at the top of this article. The files were distributed all over the disk, and fragmented as well. The red blocks in the picture indicate fragmented files.
Needless to say he removed the software from his machine. Then he ran WDD again, and obtained an improved layout:
I can only take his experience at face value, and have not been able to verify it or replicate it myself. I would be interested to know if anyone else has experienced the same problem.
What I can confirm is that DK2008 has some bugs, which I have tried to report via email, without success. It seems that the marketing department of Diskeeper Corporation is more keen on contacting me than the Technical Support team. Please leave comments if you have used DK2008 on drives of a comparable size.

Benchmarks*: Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier 12.0.758.0

The benchmark results of Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier are available in a spreadsheet. A quick summary of the results: the $99 Diskeeper 2008 doesn't always work as well as the free Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) supplied with Windows XP, and only marginally faster than DK2007. Once more I am at a loss to explain why only one of the tests achieved a result 3.9% better than WDD, or why the final I-FAAST test caused a slower result.
The graph shows Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier (DK) 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 several defrag passes using the DK program, with no "Optimize Files" or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. A 12.8% performance improvement is measured, almost identical to the WDD result.
  
• "Defrag+Auto" refers to the read time after enabling "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and the I-FAAST option in Diskeeper. An improvement of 27.0% is recorded.
  
• "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 DK program, with no I-FAAST or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. A 30.7% performance improvement has been measured, the best result so far, but only 3.9% better than "Office Auto" below.
• "I-FAAST+Auto" is the result obtained after enabling and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running DK with I-FAAST enabled . This performance improvement of 16.7% is not as good as was expected, and slower 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 12% and 30%, with better results obtained when the built-in Windows functions are employed; "Optimize Boot" is enabled by default. The only advantage is that DK2008 allows for automatic defragmentation. Still, an average 21.8% performance improvement over no defrag at all isn't bad, but I expected much better from a program that costs $99. Disabling I-FAAST provides the equivalent functionality of the $49 Diskeeper 2008 Professional, but even so this is one of the most expensive defrag packages available.
I enabled most options in DK2008, including directory consolidation, InvisiTasking, statistics collection, and so on. The top graphic shows the end result of all the tests, but the directories are still scattered around and the large clump of files at the end is presumably the result of I-FAAST moving older files to the end. I suspect this may also account for the slower performance, but can't explain why I-FAAST would think that any of the files being tested are "old" or "slow".
I did not enable the "Optimize Files" option because I didn't want it to clash with or degrade the I-FAAST facility, which represents half the cost of DK2008 Pro Premier. Clearly more work has gone into the methods used to defragment the drive, but the performance gains come with a very hefty price tag. The next program to be tested is O&O Defrag Professional Edition 10.0.1634.

Diskeeper 2008 Professional: Preliminary Results | First Impressions | A Closer Look at the DK2008 Review on 3DProfessor.org: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | How Fast is I-FAAST™? | Diskeeper 2007 Review | DK2007 Benchmark
*See: Benchmarks*: Why the Asterisk?

Benchmarks*: Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier 11.0.698.0

The review of Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier is here, and I have uploaded the results of the benchmark tests in a spreadsheet. A quick summary of the results: the $99 Diskeeper 2007 doesn't always work as well as the free Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) supplied with Windows XP. I am at a loss to explain why only one of the tests achieved a result 2.4% better than WDD, or why the final I-FAAST test caused a slower result.
The graph shows Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier (DK) 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 several defrag passes using the DK program, with no "Optimize Files" or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. Only 8.7% performance improvement is measured.
  
• "Defrag+Auto" refers to the read time after enabling "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and the I-FAAST option in Diskeeper. An improvement of 11.5% is recorded.
  
• "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 DK program, with no I-FAAST or "Optimize Boot" options enabled. A 29.6% performance improvement has been measured, the best result so far, but only 2.4% better than "Office Auto" below.
• "I-FAAST+Auto" is the result obtained after enabling and "Optimize Boot" functions in Windows, and then running DK with I-FAAST enabled . This performance improvement of 14.4% is not as good as was expected, and slower 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 8% and 29%, with better results obtained when the built-in Windows functions are employed; "Optimize Boot" is enabled by default. The only advantage is that DK2007 allows for automatic defragmentation. Still, an average 16% performance improvement over no defrag at all isn't bad, but I expected much better from a program that costs $99. Disabling I-FAAST provides the equivalent functionality of the $49 Diskeeper 2007 Professional, but even so this is one of the most expensive defrag packages available.

The DK2007 display shows how the "InvisiTasking" operation works when not much processing is going on. I used the Windows Performance Monitor to monitor % hard drive activity (not shown above), shown below as a red line, while the % processor time is shown in green.
Even though this is a "background" task it can keep the hard drive pretty busy while it runs.
I enabled most options in DK 2007, including directory consolidation, InvisiTasking, statistics collection, and so on. The very top graphic shows the end result of all the tests, but the directories are still scattered around and the large clump of files at the end is presumably the result of I-FAAST moving older files to the end.
I did not enable the "Optimize Files" option because I didn't want it to clash with or degrade the I-FAAST facility, which represents half the cost of DK2007 Pro Premier. The next tests will be Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier. Hopefully a better result can be obtained.

Diskeeper 2007 review | How Fast is I-FAAST?
*See: Benchmarks*: Why the Asterisk?

A Closer Look at the DK2008 Review on 3DProfessor.org - Part 3

In trying to make sense of the 3D Professor review of Diskeeper 2008 I have examined the results and tried to make sense of them. The final set of tests uses Autodesk 3ds Max 9 SP2, a program that is used for 3D modelling, rendering and animation. This is a typical application for high-end graphics workstations. In the review, the professor states:

"[The] Radiosity test is one of the most disc intensive render taken from the SPECapc benchmark. It really does sort out the wheat from the chaff in system builds. The uptake in performance speaks volumes by themselves ... [and] is a substantial saving in time and money to the end user."

The chart shows the results for both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. No explanation was offered as to why the CBALLS test was not run on the server. The performance improvement in the latter case is 1.9%, while on the XP workstation the claimed improvement is 15.8% for DK2007 and 26.4% for DK2008. Following the logic outlined in Part 2, all this really tells me is that DK2008 is 12.5% more effective than DK2007, and not much more.
The performance improvement of 1.9% on the server is ascribed to the fact that RAID drives are slower. But the previous test had a 6% performance gain, so the hard drive activity must have been enormous, since the graphics rendering speeds on both systems are almost identical.
On the other hand, the average read speed of the XP machine's hard drive is 124MB/sec, but the server's RAID system clocked only 52.9MB/sec. One would therefore expect the server's times to be 58% slower, yet they are faster, with or without DK2008. It doesn't make sense, and no explanation is provided.

Fawning Introduction

The introductory paragraph of this "independent review" could have been written by the same spin doctors who write the Diskeeper web site:

This is an exciting time for the crew at Diskeeper as this new product release brings with it an abundance of new features which enhance its elder of Diskeeper 2007. For years now we have been using the product exclusively primarily down to the fact that it maintains good maintenance within system performance. For over a decade, Diskeeper has been synonymous in setting new standards in the way that Microsoft Windows system defragmentation technology performs. In their true professional form, Diskeeper 2008 continues with its tradition of a true “Set It and Forget It®” performance enhancement that is the hallmark of the Diskeeper name.

Compare that with the following sentence

"For over a decade, Diskeeper has led the way in Windows system defragmentation technology, and Diskeeper 2008 continues with the tradition of true 'Set It and Forget It' performance enhancement that is a hallmark of the Diskeeper name"

which comes from the "What’s New in Diskeeper 2008" section (Chapter 4) of the "Diskeeper 2008 Administrator User's Manual".
In the "Product Enhancements" section of the review, he quotes 7 paragraphs directly from the same manual, without any reference to its source. I had a sense of deja vu reading this section, because I'd already encountered the same phrases in the DK2008 help file, and found them puzzling there too. If this was an academic paper the issue of plagiarism (or at last bad referencing) would be raised.

Selective Conclusions

The Conclusions drawn by the professor are highly selective. Take this paragraph, for example:

"The team at Diskeeper most certainly have an exciting new product that in most areas showed up to and in certain applications a 28% increase in performance over a Windows system with no defragmentation tool installed. Up to 14% increase in performance in certain areas over Diskeeper 2007 which is quite a remarkable achievement today, the development team from Diskeeper must be jumping around with glee here!"

The best result achieved is the radiosity test for XP is 28.8%, but it is hardly a representative sample of all the tests done, and no further mention is made of the HD Tach results ".. which took our breath away". How about explaining the other results as well?

Exclusive Review and Timing

I'm not complaining that the review could be published on the same day the product was launched. The beta testing phase closed on 3rd October, and from the HD Tach results we know that testing was done between 7th October and 12th October, in time for the launch date of 23rd October. What worries me is that no explanation if offered for this situation, nor is there any mention that the tests were done using the beta version of DK 2008 (The final build date of version 12.0.758.0 is 16 October 2007, 20:04:12).
When I stated in another posting that it was not clear whether DK had sponsored the review or not, I got the following email from Celine Bouquillon at Diskeeper Europe:

"I wanted to point out that the review published in "3dprofessor.org" has absolutely not been paid for by our company. And he is not affiliated to us in anyway. He is just a big fan of our product :-) If I have sent the link to you, it is precisely because he is a third party, as you are. It would not have made sense for me to send it to you if it was not the case. May I ask you to do some research on such claims before publishing them?"

I must therefore take it on face value that this is the case, but the reviewer has not been scientific or independent. Given my rants about DK 2007 I can hardly be the one to expect the professor to be impartial or objective, but when material is copied and pasted from the help file, and irrelevant tests are performed that prove nothing but still manage to "take our breath away", I start questioning the usefulness of the review in its entirety.

My conclusions: the 3D Professor is a well-meaning hobbyist who ran a battery of standard tests used for all his reviews, without much thought to their relevance or scientific merit. His enthusiasm for the product is clear, but the only valid conclusions that can be drawn from the tests are that the automatic defragmentation in DK2008 gives faster results than DK2007. The value of the review is diminished by hype and lack of clarity. I am not convinced that the correct tests were carried out.

A Closer Look at the DK2008 Review on 3DProfessor.org: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | How Fast is I-FAAST™? | Diskeeper 2008 Professional: Preliminary Results | First Impressions | Diskeeper 2007 Review | Benchmarks: DK2008 and DK2007

A Closer Look at the DK2008 Review on 3DProfessor.org - Part 2

This graph is taken from the 3D Professor review of Diskeeper 2008: they show SPECviewperf® 10 results. I had no idea what those were, so I went to the SPEC site and read up about them. They measure the speed with which a given system can draw things in 3D. This is important when you are configuring or comparing high-end graphics workstations, because a fast result hopefully means you get more work done.

"SPECviewperf parses command lines and data files, sets the rendering state, and converts data sets to a format that can be traversed using OpenGL rendering calls. It renders the data set for a pre-specified amount of time or number of frames with animation between frames. Finally, it outputs the results.
SPECviewperf reports performance in frames per second. Other information about the system under test -- all the rendering states, the time to build display lists (if applicable), and the data set used -- are also output in a standardized report."

In the section "What SPECviewperf® Does and Doesn't Do" the writers state:

"Nearly all benchmarks are designed for a specific purpose. Quite often, however, users broaden that purpose beyond what the benchmark is designed to do, or in some cases they assume the benchmark can't do something that it actually can do. The SPECviewperf® benchmark is no different: it has been both overextended and underappreciated, sometimes reducing its overall value to the user."

Once again the results posted show little, if anything, to do with file fragmentation, and the graphs look quite scientific, but mean very little. It certainly doesn't show any clear difference between the products. I'm not sure what the professor means by

"Although minor points gains in many areas across the board each gained X.X point are in higher circles valuable scoring patterns and mean more sales to the resellers as corporate buying patterns are heavily based upon these results shown."

It sounds like too much caffeine to me. I can't decode it at all.
Also, the results are shown "Without Fragmentation" in Windows, but I think the label meant to read "Without Defragmentation", since there is no mention of using the built-in Windows defragger in competition with Diskeeper, and the previous test refers to tests "... without any hard drive defragmentation tool enabled".
In the other section the professor lists the elapsed times measured when running "SPECapc for 3ds Max™ 9", which

"... measures performance based on the workload of a typical user, including functions such as wireframe modeling, shading, texturing, lighting, blending, inverse kinematics, object creation and manipulation, editing, scene creation, particle tracing, animation and rendering. The benchmark runs under both OpenGL and DX implementations of 3ds Max 9, and tests all the components that come into play when running the application."

The 3D Professor review states these results but doesn't graph or tabulate them. I did the chart above in Excel, and calculate a 3.4% time saving with DK2007, and a 6.4% time saving with DK2008. The professor's conclusion is "A substantial improvements [sic] across the board, biggest improvement overall with Diskeeper 2008 installed on a fresh system."
As I understand it, the professor is saying that compared to a fragmented system, DK 2008's 6% improvement is substantial. What is missing from this analysis is the time the tests would have taken if the fresh system had been defragmented first. So far this is only an argument for using a defragger, not for using a specific defragger.
I am also extremely suspicious of the results for the Windows 2003 Server. They are exactly the same as the Windows XP results, down to the last second. Each machine has a different processor, different amounts of RAM, and different hard drive speeds. The only aspect in common is the "ATI FireGL V3600 Professional Graphic's [sic] Card". If the results are the same because the same graphics card is used, then why would a defrag product make the graphics card run 6.4% faster? I assume the results obtained are different from those published, and this is a cut and paste error.
Another point that needs clarification: was Diskeeper simply installed and enabled, but the manual defrag not run? The conclusion wording is vague (bold added):

"The amount of data and time needed to be collated and cross checked has been tremendous. At times when we undertake reviews here we just take for granted the overall performance that the products tested produce some remarkable results. Though on reflection we sit back and realise on just how much performance is obtained with no degeneration in system performance with the Diskeeper running on “the fly”!
... With Diskeeper 2008 we had all the possible functionality enabled during both Windows XP and Server 2003 tests. The intelligent mode in which Diskeeper functions utilising ... Windows API's is spectacular.
... Sincerely for the non-user's of this product, with this sort of performance increase to be gained from a simple effect software tool working away quietly in the background!

From this we can be sure that the background defrag was enabled, but no mention is made of an initial defrag. The "Software & Benchmarks Utilised" section lists the products used, and then states

"A mixed combination of some 10GBs software and benchmarks - for those who are aware; fragment the hard drive into a complete and utter mess once all of the above is installed. Each set of tests were completed on a fresh installation of all the above software, each time we low level formatted the hard drives to clear the MBR’s etc. Therefore the time to complete each set of results has been substantial as results are triple checked to ensure that no anomalies are seen. This combination mix of benchmarks and software would therefore ensure that the whole system I/O was fully stretched to its limits and ensure that the new software from Diskeeper would function as its fullest workload capacity.

Again, no mention of any manual defrag to fix the "complete and utter mess". This is troubling from several aspects:

• The results ignore the built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter, making DK appear better, because the tests compare a well-configured Diskeeper system with a badly configured Windows system.
  
• The background defrag would stop during the tests, but it may not have completed yet, making the results erratic, and prejudicing DK's true abilities.
• By starting from scratch each time, the I-FAAST file placement system is unable to work, because it needs several days to get data on the usage of the system in order to place the files correctly. Since I-FAAST constitutes 50% of the cost of DK2008 Pro Premier, this is a serious omission.
  

If these omissions were made, it calls into question the professor's understanding of what defragmentation is, and how Diskeeper works.
Then there is an interesting snippet in the latest white paper by Joe Kinsella, "The Impact of Disk Fragmentation", published on diskeeper.com. Figure 5 from that paper is shown below.
According to these figures, a fresh install of Windows XP followed by SP2 would create roughly 636 fragmented files with 3582 fragments. That doesn't include the 75 critical downloads of 185MB that follow SP2. The table above implies that this would generate several hundred more fragmented files.
For a fair test of Windows XP all these files would need to be defragmented, along with the 10GB of other software installed. Ideally this would be done by WDD. After this is done it could be backed up using Acronis True Image or DriveImage XML, to speed up reconfiguring the machines each time a fresh install was performed. The professor's review does not mention any details of this sort, which is worrying. Hopefully this is an oversight and the comparisons were fair after all. I have made several attempts to contact Professor Brian Robinson, and even searched for him on Google, without success.
Another look at the chart above could explain the 3.4% and 6.4% time savings as follows: DK2008 does appear to have a more effective background defrag capability than DK2007, and this is touted as “‘defragmentation intelligence’ enhancements” in the press release and the review. In that case the only effective conclusion we can reach is that DK2008 is 3.1% more effective than DK2007. I'm not sure that this was the professor's intention, but it is the only reliable conclusion I can make, based on the data he presents in these tests.

A Closer Look at the DK2008 Review on 3DProfessor.org: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | How Fast is I-FAAST™? | Diskeeper 2008 Professional: Preliminary Results | First Impressions | Diskeeper 2007 Review | Benchmarks: DK2008 and DK2007

How Fast is I-FAAST™?

According to the Diskeeper.com web site, Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier is "specially designed for high-end systems and power users! Get an EXTRA performance boost above and beyond anything you have ever experienced before - even better than when your system was new!"
The only "extra" feature is this version is I-FAAST, and it costs an extra $50 per workstation, more than the cost of any other defrag utility. According to the web site

Diskeeper's I-FAAST 2.0 (Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology) accelerates file access times to meet the heavy workloads of file-intensive applications. Utilizing a specially formulated technology, I-FAAST closely monitors file usage and organizes the most commonly accessed files for the fastest possible access, boosting file access and creation to speeds above and beyond the capabilities of your system when it was new, up to 80% faster.

I found an interesting 2005 document entitled "Benchmarking Diskeeper’s I-FAAST" which explains that Diskeeper monitors all files being opened and modified, and uses this statistical information to work out which files are more important.

"I-FAAST was designed specifically for real world environments where data is a heterogeneous mix of often used or “Hot” files, and stale or duplicate and unused data. In real world scenarios, it is also true that data goes through “hot and cold” phases, and that a significant amount of data is, or must be kept, for regulatory or archival purposes; often intermixed on active storage media. All these and other common scenarios are integrated into I-FAAST’s heuristic algorithm."

For that reason it takes a few days for the I-FAAST stats to be gathered before any noticeable change happens to your data. So far I have noticed that some of my files have been moved to the slowest part of the volume. Apart from that not much has changed.
In order to accelerate the effect, I created a utility to load several applications that I use on a regular basis. The utility is run at startup, and over the course of several minutes loads Word, Excel, Access, Paint Shop Pro, Outlook, VB6, Firefox, Access97, etc. etc. The timing between each one is set to around 30 seconds, so each app gets a chance to load before the next application starts loading. I didn't want to overwork my poor machine!
To get DK to learn about these common apps, I set the Task Scheduler to do a reboot every 30 minutes, and left my laptop doing reboots for the next 2 nights, effectively running each app around 30 times, in addition to normal use during the day.
The document about I-FAAST also refers to a freeware utility called readfile, which can measure the speed with which a given file can be opened/read. I have been using it to measure the effect of the I-FAAST placement on my system. So far the results have been inconclusive. Readfile doesn't work in a BartPE environment, so I have had to use Process Explorer from Sysinternals to make sure that no extraneous tasks are running during the measurement process. This is easier said than done.
Here is the "before" situation, with dozens of programs and processes running.
I shut down as many as possible before using readfile. I had to experiment a few times before getting reliable results. In each case I made sure the laptop booted up from scratch, and that none of the application data being tested was loaded on startup.
Here are my initial preliminary results. (Lower values are faster). The column "Access97" refers to the folder
"C:\Program Files\Office97\Office"
which contains the installation of Access97 that I use on a daily basis. The column "OfficeXP" refers to the folder
"C:\Program Files\OfficeXP\Office10"
which contains the bulk of the EXE and DLL files for Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint and Access that is part of Microsoft Office 2002/XP. I usually only use the first 3 applications.
The column labelled "Data" refers to the folder
"C:\SQL\MSSQL\Data"
This contains 8.19GB of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 data that I use regularly. At the time I made the first DK2008 measurement, one of the files had 2 fragments that DK2008 decided not to defragment, for its own reasons. This was confirmed to me by a senior support person at Diskeeper Europe.

• The blue results are for Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier with I-FAAST enabled, as well as automatic defragmentation, directory consolidation and statistics gathering all enabled.
• The purple results were generated after I ran JkDefrag 3.28 several times until it had moved and defragmented all the files on the drive. The total read time is 5.6% faster than the DK2008 result.
• The yellow results were generated after I ran PerfectDisk 8 after the JkDefrag changes. I did a boot time defrag first, and then a SmartPlacement defrag. The resulting total read time is 14.3% faster than the DK2008 result.

Are these results significant? I think it's too early to tell conclusively.
This is DK2008's drive map. The large red file is the SQL data file in two segments, as already mentioned.
After JkDefrag's complete defrag, all the files have been reorganised with the directories first, then the tell-tale 1% free space at the beginning of the drive, then the important files, then another 1% space, then the "spacehogs" at the end.
This is the disk arrangement after PerfectDisk 8 did its boot time defrag and SmartPlacement. Notice how the bulk of the free space is at the end, not spread all over the volume.
Each program has its own distinctive pattern. After running DK2008's defrag again, it moved some files to the end of the drive, as shown below.
Further testing will tell if more I-FAAST history and analysis can make a significant performance difference or not.
Update Tuesday 6th Nov: I was wondering if a readfile scan of the entire directory would not prejudice the DK2008 results because this would include "slow" files as well as "fast" ones, so I totalled up the read times for recently accessed EXE and DLL files only, i.e the ones I-FAAST is supposed to be optimising. Readfile has a problem calculating times for files larger than 4GB, so the "Data" directory is excluded.
The graph shown above provides the readfile times for EXE and DLL files only, using the same measurements as the first graph. The DK2008 data fared worse, not better; JkDefrag proved to be 13.4% faster, and PerfectDisk 8 is 20.1% faster. I will wait a few more days to see if the file placement improves, and then run the test again for DK2008. I cannot explain the difference in performance, because file placement by itself should not account for more than 15% at the most. Since we are dealing with single contiguous directories, the position of the directory shouldn't make such a difference either.
Craig Jensen's document on I-FAAST states

"This new technology adds even greater performance gains than previously available through defragmentation alone, improving file access and creation up to an additional 80%, with typical added gains between 10-20%."

My data only refers to read access of defragmented files, so I still can't explain what is happening, and why I-FAAST read access would be 20% slower, not faster. More testing is needed.

A Closer Look at the DK2008 Review on 3DProfessor.org: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | How Fast is I-FAAST™? | Diskeeper 2008 Professional: Preliminary Results | First Impressions | Diskeeper 2007 Review | Benchmarks: DK2008 and DK2007