This has been an interesting week… Lots going on at the Spera house, lots going on with Apple, and lots going on here at Gear Diary.  One of the reviews I just posted, Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier, is generating a lot of e-mail traffic for me behind the scenes.  Please watch the site for a review on another defrag product, PerfectDisk…there’s a whole lot of defragging going on!

…and speaking of which, you may remember that I mentioned that I purchased a WD MyBook World II 1TB NAS on eBay last month, and installed it on my home network.  When the network is up (don’t ask…I’m not sure why my network is so fragile), it works like a charm, and the included Access Anywhere software from MioNet is truly awesome. However, I’ve run into an interesting problem…

While its not a huge issue just yet, with all of the defragging that I’ve been doing, I thought I’d check the fragmentation level of the NAS just to make certain that all of the backing up and file copying that I’ve been doing to it doesn’t skew all the data.  While this isn’t a huge problem in a 1TB drive now, (I’ve only used about 180GB so far), it might be an issue later. I’ve got over 800GB of contiguous space, so there shouldn’t be much fragmentation on it for a while.

Interestingly enough, the device shows up in My Computer as an NT Server UNC; but the Computer Management Console can’t see it. I’ve got a call out to Diskeeper Corporation to address this and will get back to everyone in Comments with the solution, if they have one…

I remember back in the day, the only tool that I knew of that actually had a defrag tool of any real value was Norton Utilities.  In fact, I believe that Stacker, a drive compression tool that provided real time, data compression and decompression (effectively doubling the size of your drive…) of data on your drive ended up using an embedded version of Norton’s defrag utility. Point being, I loved that utility. It did everything that I needed it to do, including consolidating my directories, without having to boot to a command prompt; but alas, those days are long gone.

With the introduction of large capacity hard drives and the evolution of MS operating systems with the introduction of Windows XP, defrag tools have also evolved.  Norton Defrag doesn’t work with any modern OS, and hasn’t since, I think 1997-98. So, I’ve had to find another tool. 

Honestly, I’ve bounced back and forth between a couple different tools based on industry input and reviews, and with the implementation of different technologies.  Lately, I’ve been using Diskeeper’s 2008 Pro Premier product and I have to say, I am very pleased. Is it the tool for you?  Let’s take a quick peek and see…

 

Continue Reading