Does anyone here use disc defraggers on a regular basis?  Do you see any benefits?  What ones do you use?

Win7 has an integrated Defraggler, which is doing quite a good job.

All in all, I do agree with DJ on this topic. The improvement in the access-rate is barely measurable on modern HDDs.

I use it once in a while on my data hard drive – but never on my SSD hard drive, since that would actually harm the disc. "Trim" is used on the SSD though.

I have over 18,000 profiles and a profiler backup file is around 23g. I backup to an external drive and keep two backup copies on two separate external drives. i used keep high res cover images, but now I just keep what Invelos calls high-res cover images.

When start-up time got to over 3  to 4 minutes I started looking for faster and better way to defrag my system.
Using the standard win7 defrag doesn't make a lot of difference.

I use a defrag that you can define zones. In other words the certain files are placed zones. You can use Their standard setup and/or user defined zones. The difference in Invelos Profiler start-up s 90 to 120 seconds against over 240 seconds using Microsoft's defrag.

It has 3 modes a quick , optimize, and complete optimize.
The complete optimize packs the packs the files, leaves no spaces for file expansion. This mode has the poorest system load time.

I use the quick because leaves things loose and only takes a couple of minutes.. With that I also ran a program that gets rid of so-called system clutter. Be careful which program you use for this it can get rid of of something you use.

At one time I've had over a million files my system, now I periodically move files off the system disc that I don't use regularly to a removable disc, a 2T my book which is partitioned to do its normal backup function and as a save area.

I remember several ears ago Honeywell used to have visiting professors teach courses in plant. A professor from University of California, Berkeley taught a class on paging and disc allocation, etc. Six hours a day or a couple of weeks, you talk about boring. Results, it seemed to me unless you a can provide some heuristics to the equation all the methods were a toss up.

Thanks for your replies.  They have been helpful.  I have both an XP system 2 Win7 systems.  I think I might try one of the free utilities for the XP system.

Quoting Lewis_Prothero:

Quote:
Most of these Freeware-solutions are more of the religious kind.
Means: You have to believe they actually do something else then shoving pixels over your screen and creating random HDD-access noise.

Oooh! I'll have to sit back and not say anything in case I start a war over that statement

Quoting KinoNiki:

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If you want to boost your system, it's far more efficient to buy an SSD for the OS and keep the bulk of your data on a separate drive.

^^ This!

But since especially the "Low-Budget" SSDs have a large variety in quality, I'd recommend to check out for user reviews of the product in question.

Quoting bbbbb:

Quote:
Quoting Floorwalker:

Quote:
Does anyone here use disc defraggers

No.

You have replied incorrectly. Several people here have said that they actually do use defraggers. So the answer to the question if anyone uses them is yes.