One aspect of Diskeeper I avoided on this thread initially was the treatment of SSD drives, until I had more solid fact to go on. Whilst I have used Diskeeper since its inception back in the Dark Ages (!), the advent of solid disk drives and the latest Diskeeper version warrented a pause until I had solid data, as the change both to Solid State Drives and the latest version of Diskeeper creates a whole new ball park.
Its remarkable what they have achieved. I installed the latest version of Diskeeper on 18 Aug, halfway through a three week holiday break. I had installed SSDs at the start of August. For the last three weeks the stats have been building up, and its remarkable, and very very significant for SSDs. Bare in mind that the overall "enemy" of SSDs is disk accesses, and whilst an overeaction to "any" disk access should be avoided - they are after all built for that (!) - nontheless, their inherent relative disk life compared to traditional Hard Disks warrents attention and habit changes to prolong SSD life. Stats for the last 24 hours on my 3960 Box (running the PC on BOINC - traditionally heavy on disk accesses as such - for about 70% of the 24 hour period):
Disk Accesses Prevented by Intelliwrite: 46,291
Disk Access Eliminated by Instant Defrag (defrag "on the fly" before it hits the disk) 23
Disk Accesses Eliminated by Traditional Defragmentation: 82
Cumulative Disk IO Acesses Saved (therefore speeding up PC reponse times) 7,171,971
That is remarkable ...... and very very good news for SSDs whose great enemy is disk accesses. To have 46,291 disk accesses stopped before they got any where near the disk, 23 stopped "at the front door", and 82 dealt with "after they sat down", is stunning
Overall it has got to the stage with Diskeeper that they no loner produce pretty Fragmentation graphs blinking away during Defrag, there is no point - there are so little fragmented On-Disk packets to deal with rofl
With SSDs the trick is to turn off On-Disk defrag as its pointless (don't defrag on-disk with SSDs - baaaaad idea, it hits overall life span considerably) and leave the Diskeeper IntelliWrite facility turned on. The latter stops Fragmented packets hitting the disk in the first place, all good news for SSDs with finite disk access life, and equally good for non-SSDs response times. Even traditional Hard Disks, there is vertually zero defragging is needed due to the IntelliWrite facility stopping fragmented packets hitting the disk at all.
The point to bare in mind, is that it also means that Diskeeper can handle a mixed Hard Disk / SSD environment, optimising its activities for the type of disc it comes across. So those with (say) 1xSSD and 1xHard Disk drive as their main drives get the best of all worlds and able to tune the Defrag activity to their pecise needs - mixing techniques to suit SSD or Hard Disk.
Cost is peanuts frankly, its a one off fee, not annual. don't bother with the "Home" addition, get the Pro version - its £41.11, and that covers up to three PCs. So at a cost of about £14 a PC lasting for 18-24 months before a new version comes along, its a No-Brainer.
I was a great fan of Diskeeper before SSDs, I am an even greater fan now .... a remarkable collection of software - run, don't walk, and get it for a - fast - hassle free SSD life
http://www.condusiv.com/
Regards
Zy