UltimateDefrag is probably the closest program yet reviewed to being the "ultimate" defrag software, particularly if you're a power user. It gets a "Thumbs Up" rating in spite of its flaws.
The first good thing about UD is the manual. It's a well-written PDF file that explains a lot about hard drives, how they work, and how defragmentation can improve the performace and responsiveness of the drive.
Another good thing is that it's easy to install, and fairly intuitive to use. When you do the trail download you supply your email address, and over the next week or so you get 5 short tutorial emails explaining how to get started and use UD to it full potential.
It doesn't do any "on-the-fly" defragmenting, but you can schedule it to run when the PC isn't busy (almost the same as a screen saver option), or at pre-defined times. It also has a boot-time option to defrag system files, and it respects the information in the "
layout.ini" file.
The speed of a hard drive varies from the "outside" to the "inside" of the drive, and UD has numerous options and techniques to capitalise on this fact. You can "archive" files or file types by relocating them to slower areas of the disk, and prioritise other files or folders by moving them to the faster areas of the disk.
So with a bit of tweaking you can improve the layout of the hard drive and make performance gains in the process. Of course you could also make bad choices and slow things down, and so there are numerous automatic and recommended settings that assist. What I don't understand is why a lot of the recommended options aren't already checked, or even marked with an asterisk or something.
Another good idea is to move the directories close to the Master File Table (MFT) because they are often used together anyway. I haven't seen any other programs do this.
The on-screen display of the hard drive as a circular disk is unique, but not always entirely helpful. You can change the granularity of the display by adjusting the "zoom" settings. You can also set limits on the maximum % resources used, although it doesn't always honour them. There is a colour for files being moved, but it only shows where they are being moved from, not the new location, so if you are watching the way UD works, you are often still in the dark as to what is going on. Usually the current file name is displayed at the bottom of the screen, but not always, yet the program seems to be busy anyway.
For the first few days I allowed UD to operate on its "AUTO" setting, to get a feel for how the program would improve my drive without much user intervention. The results were OK. If that's all you need then
UltimateDefrag Lite (US$11.97) will save you some money, but in my opinion it's too crippled, because it offers no boot-time defrag, something that is still important over the long term.
The optimisation strategy relies on the "last accessed date" of files. This is theoretically fine, except that compressing a file changes its last accessed date, and I found that the entire "media" directory and subdirectories from
OfficeXP, consisting mostly of clipart that don't use, was moved to the faster area of the disk. I guess I could use
filetouch.exe or something to change this, but it was a bit disappointing. I guess
Microsoft broke its own rules.
You can override these settings by specifying files or file types to treat as high performance or archive types. I found the interface at this point somewhat clunky. Certain common extension types are left out, such as mp3 (although mp1, mp2 and mp4 are listed), and you can't jump to a particular extension such as exe or rar easily. I found it quicket to click on "Custom" and type in the file type, and then scroll to the bottom of the list to find my custom entry. Since this is such an important part of the optimisation process, I would have expected these options to be pre-filled with common extensions to be treated as high performance (exe, sys, dll) and archive (zip, cab, rar) by default. It would also be nice to be able to copy settings from drive C: to D:.
Unfortunately I will not be using UD because it failed my "torture test" and my "large files" test. It chokes on big files. The moment I created my two large SQL data files on drive C:, the analyse time went from a few seconds to 14 minutes. When I decompressed these files to their full size and then requested a defrag, it failed, or at least didn't do anything to defrag the file. I should point out that WDD failed to defrag them either, and contig.exe complained about not enough free disk space. But a US$39.95 program should be able to defrag any file that isn't locked, IMHO.
I re-compressed the file and used contig to defragment it again. Then I left my laptop running on the "Consolidate" option overnight. After 12 hours it hadn't finished and the drive looked in a bit of a mess.
On my D: drive I have a 4GB file used by
TrueCrypt, and when I asked for this file to be placed on the outside of the drive. After an hour or so it had moved the file, but the free disk space was disorganised. I changed a few settings in the file preferences, and a more thorough "consolidate" pass eventually sorted it out.
It seems to be a weakness that the MFT can land up anywhere on the drive and UD simply has to work around it somehow. I realise it could be difficult if not impossible to move the MFT, but this has to be considered when allocating free space and moving files around. I could find no mention that this is being done, and the drive diagrams appear to confirm this.
My overall impression is that this program is sluggish and vulnerable to giving up when large file are involved. If your files are all smaller than a few GB in size then I think this program will be a serious contender. Despite the good ideas and mostly good implementation, I can't rely on it for my needs. It's a pity, because this is a good product.
Next, I'm taking a break, and will return next week with another review.
Update: Both
UltimateDefrag and
UltimateDefrag Lite require an opening in the Windows firewall, which has to be closed manually once the programs are uninstalled.
Update 2: Version 1.72 is now
freeware, following the release of UltimateDefrag 2008
Don't expect any test results for a few days, because this is what the Windows XP Disk Defragmenter (WDD) is having to deal with: 75% full hard drive with a lot of fragmented files, both large and small, including big compressed files with lots of fragments.
Update Sunday 1 March: As I start noting the results of the benchmarks, I have coined the term "the slouch factor" to describe what happens when a hard drive gets full. We've all noticed how a Windows machine usually feels slower after a long time of use, and as the drive gets full. There is an explanation for this, best described by Robert Ferraro of DiskTrix, in the "Hard Drive Performance Theory" section of the UltimateDefrag help file.
As the drive fills up and is kept "tidy" by a traditional defrag program like WDD, the position of the available free space gradually moves towards the slow end of the drive, affecting the seek time and transfer rates of new and temporary files. The computer starts to slouch, hence the slouch factor.
Boot time defrag capabilities have been around for years, but as Windows becomes more complex and file security gets tighter, boot time defrag becomes more useful. The defrag is done while your PC boots up (i.e. at boot time) before all the windows services get loaded, i.e. when the minimal number of files are being used.
I will be publishing benchmarks and a review of version 2008 sometime soon, and the older version was 
