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General Computers - Drive Defragmenters - Not All The Same

SUMMARY: Not all disk defragmenters work the same way - learn how two disk defragmenters work differently.

It is generally known that in order to optimize your hard drive's speed and its life, you need to defragment the drives often. This places file contents closer to each other on the HD instead of spreading out information. Drive defragmenters are not all the same, however, and the numbers they provide can be dramatically different.

For a test case, I used a Win95 system and checked two drive partitions - a 1.63 gb partition and a 1.17 gb partitions. I tested Microsoft's OSR1 Win95 Defragmenter and Norton Utilities' V2.0 Win95 Defragmenter, SpeedDisk.

1.63 gb partition
Microsoft reported 1% fragmentation
Norton reported 3% fragmentation

A 2% difference. Which one do you believe?

1.17 gb partition
Norton reported a 7% fragmentation
Microsoft reported a 0% fragmentation

Again, which is the correct number? With differences like these, there is no way to tell. However, because of the differences and possible high fragmentation percentage, I would recommend defragging the drives in these scenarios.