Defrag with Defraggler

Piriform’s Defraggler has been designed as a lightweight, portable instrument to defragment the data on your hard disk, thus contribute to improving overall system performance. It sports options for defragging system files as well as individual items.

The application is free of charge and can be installed on your system or you can use its portable release and simply unzip and run the executable. Both installable and portable editions can be ran on 32 and 64-bit Windows 7, XP and Vista.

As soon as it launches it gets straight to the point and shows all drives on the system, including removable ones. Next, you have a simple interface making available all the options you need to easily start defragging the partitions.

The three sections splitting the interface give you information on the drives, shows the drive map so you can have a visual representation of the fragmentation level and how data is disposed; the lower part of the screen is reserved for details on the current state of the selected drive: amount of fragmented data, fragmentation level and total number of fragments.

In order to test the application’s efficiency we used a 2GB partition with 200MB of free space (10%), for which Defraggler reported a 97% fragmentation level. At the beginning of the test the total number of fragments was a little over 19,000 while the count for fragmented files reached 494.

After 15’05’’ the application showed a decrease in fragmentation to 45%, which is less than half. Given the low amount of time it took for the job, this is good news. However, after running an analysis just to be sure of the values, the program changed its mind and reported a much lower fragmentation rate, of only 8%.

In this case, we used PerfectDisk to make things a bit more clear, but although it showed readings closer to what Defraggler reported, the fragmentation level was a tad off, at 0.6%. However, there was agreement on the fragmented files and their fragments.

Running another optimization job, which took 1’10’’, dropped fragmentation to 5% in Defraggler (no further optimization could be done at this point), while PerfectDisk showed 0.4% and pointed the exact two fragmented files remaining, as Piriform’s product. The disagreement about the fragmentation level is understandable since the two programs had a different interpretation of the initial fragmentation level, Defraggler showing 97% while PerfectDisk reported 62.7%.



The conclusion of this test is that Defraggler manages to drop fragmentation level on a heavily fragmented drive, despite the free low space available.

Although a freebie, Defraggler incorporates multiple defragmentation methods, which include both quick jobs that can be run more often, as well as more thorough ones. Free space has also been taken into consideration by the developer, making available the possibility to run optimization jobs targeting the free areas. Also, you can use the program to defragment files individually.

Configuration options in the application allow you to create an exclusion list with data that should be avoided during the optimization operations or enable Defraggler to move large files to the end of the drive, or just specific file types. Additionally, quick defrag can be configured to deal only with fragments of a user-defined amount or split in a certain number of fragments.

A built-in scheduler will automate the defrag jobs for each of the available drives, thus keeping the disk optimized at all times. Defragmentation in Defraggler can also extend to system files that cannot be moved while the system is running. In this case you have the option to enable “Boot Time Defrag” feature which will intervene on the system data before boot; you can enable it to perform at each boot or only one time.

Despite its simple looks Defraggler hides quite a powerful defragmentation engine, ready to tackle drives with a heavy amount of file fragments and reduce them to a minimum. Resource usage during our tests showed more attention from the CPU, peaking at 33%.

You can view all the fragmented items on a selected drive, with info on their path and size (clicking anywhere on the drive map shows the data present on that spot). These benefit from the same defrag options as the entire partition.



The Good

It is free of charge and can be used from a removable drive. The scheduler lets you automate the optimization process for each drive individually.

In our case Defraggler managed to drop fragmentation level on the test drive from 97% to 5% having just 10% of free space at its disposal.

You can tweak the defragmentation process by creating an exclusion list or defining targets of a certain type and size. Also, you can use it to defrag both occupied space as well as free spots.

The Bad

We noticed a change in displaying fragmentation level after running a defrag job and then an analysis of the drive.

The Truth

Defraggler puts at your disposal the necessary means to reduce fragmentation level of both stored data as well as system files. Despite being a freebie, it makes available options putting you in control of the defragmentation process.

The application is flexible enough to offer the possibility to defrag individual files and folders. At some level Defraggler is on the same line as some paid products or very close behind.