Puran Defrag Free Edition

Whether you like it or not, defragmenting your hard drives, at least from time to time, is a necessity on all Windows systems. Puran Defrag has been created as a dedicated solution to defrag the data on the hard disks and prevent future performance drops.

The landscape for disk defragmentation software has definitely changed a lot in the past years when it was quite a task to find a good application to keep the files contiguous and thus maintain the performance of the storage device at optimum standards.

Puran Defrag comes in two flavors, one paid ($19.95) and a free one, which is the object of this review. Feature-wise, there is no gap between them as they both allow you to run the optimization procedure on lower priority or defrag individual files. Moreover, both have support for command-line usage.

Actually, as the developer mentions, the two versions are one and the same, except that you have to pay the fee for commercial use. Otherwise you have to restrict its benefits for private and non-commercial usage.

Installation runs quickly and with no fuss at all and at the end of the process you can choose the application to start automatically.

The interface is clean and simple, with few menus, but it makes available all the necessary options for quick, efficient optimization runs. In the main screen there are listed all the drives available to the system together with details like size and amount of free space.

The options at hand include analysis of the selected drive, defragmentation and boot-time defrag choices. For the latter there is the possibility to combine multiple actions, such as defrag operation preceded and followed by a system restart/shutdown or disk checking.

If you want the optimization session not to affect your work on the computer you can enable it to run in low priority mode. This will assign the minimum of system resources to the process and will require more time to complete, but you will be able to work on the system without its performance being compromised in any way.

Unlike other defraggers out there, Puran sports only one defragmentation method, which can be tweaked with additional operations in order to get the desired result. Thus, you can instruct the program to fill gaps between the files in order to prevent future fragmentation, place directories on the fastest section of the disk for quicker access or reserve free space on the faster tracks of the disks for Windows’ temporary data.

Furthermore, the application brings its own optimization algorithm, PIOZR (Puran Intelligent Optimizer), which moves frequently used data to the faster areas of the disk in order to improve performance.

Exceptions can be set so that the application skips data according to their size or you can add specific files to be overlooked during the optimization process.

Automating the defragmentation procedure, both regular as well as during boot-time, is also a possibility. You define the parameters and when the operation should start: when the screensaver kicks in, system is idle for a specific period of time or after a user-defined period of time.

Feature-wise Puran Defrag meets all the standards required to carry out an optimization procedure. The settings are presented in a different form, but their effect is the same as in any first class free defragger.

The results of our tests showed that it can do well on drives in poor health. We faced it against a 2GB drive with 10% free space available and a fragmentation level detected by Puran at 92%. Other defraggers were in slight disagreement with this fragmentation degree and would give 92.2% or go higher, at 97%. Regardless of this, they all fell in with the amount of fragmented data and showed the same files and number of fragments they were split into.

It managed to up the performance of the said drive to 84.5% by reducing file fragmentation to 1%. However impressive this may sound, in order to reach this outcome we needed to insist with the optimization procedure nine times.

Despite the positive results, because of the total amount of time required to obtain them and the effort of initiating the procedure every few minutes (that’s how long a run takes to complete) Puran Defrag does not come as the easiest to use in its area of expertise. As such, unless you have the time to waste, for heavily fragmented drives we would recommend a different solution, one capable to achieve the same outcome in fewer sessions.

On the upside, the program achieved its purpose and showed it can handle difficult jobs successfully. This means that the ordinary Joe would be satisfied with results on a less fragmented storage device.

The Good

It is easy to use and installs with minimum effort from your part. There are few settings to tinker with and all of them are extremely easy to access thanks to the minimalist interface.

It can handle regular defragmentation jobs with no problem, delivering improved performance, but heavily fragmented data is also dealt with successfully, even if there is as little as 10% of space available.

The Bad

We do not totally agree with filling in the gaps between the files since this would improve free space analysis results but files would continue to be fragmented.

The Truth

Puran Defrag Free Edition is a great solution for the average user as it can up the performance of your drives with little effort and time. High fragmentation levels are brought down to a minimum even if there is little free space on the drive, but you may find that tackling this task is time consuming and requires plenty of effort.