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The UltraDefrag Handbook  5.0.0
Tips and Tricks

Initial Usage

Freshly used drives can be defragmented immediately, any drive, which has been in use for a long time without maintenance, should be checked for consistency first.

CHKDSK {Drive:} /F /V
this checks the drive and repairs it if needed
CHKDSK {Drive:} /R /F /V
this checks the drive, repairs it and collects lost clusters if needed (takes quite long, but is the safest)

Flash and SSD Drives

The use of disk defragmentation is not recommended on flash memory or solid-state drives (SSD), as it may reduce the lifespan of the drive. As flash memory does not rely on physical movement to read the drive, random file access is much faster than a mechanical hard drive, so defragmentation is not necessary.

On the other hand, flash drives defragmentation increases their potential for recovery as mentioned in our forum.

Floppy Drives

Floppy drives defragmentation is not recommended, because it always reduces the lifespan of the floppies.

Performance Considerations

Performance of UltraDefrag from best to worst

Running at Boot Time
this is the fastest, since there are no other processes running
Running in Safe Mode
here are only a limited number of processes running, which are essential to operate Windows
Running with Anti-virus Software disabled
read and write operations are not interrupted by the AV process
Running when the System is fully used
this is the worst and not recommended at all, since many files are locked by running applications. You should never use this to process entire volumes.
Using quick instead of full optimization
Quick optimization is much faster than full optimization due to only moving fragmented files to the end of the volume first.
This makes it perfectly suited for system and boot drives.

You must disable your virus detection software before using UltraDefrag. Any virus scanner running during the defragmentation extremely slows down the process.

Some Anti-virus programs allow to exclude processes from being monitored, if your Anti-virus program supports this, you can use it instead of disabling it completely. You may still encounter slower performance compared to running UltraDefrag at boot or in safe mode.

It is recommended to exclude as much files as possible from defragmentation - this will dramatically decrease the defragmentation time. Temporary files and archives are usually rarely accessed and may be left fragmented without a noticeable system performance degradation.

It is also highly recommended to disable the Windows paging file. It expands RAM, but works much slower therefore highly decreases the system performance. If more RAM is needed than physically installed, setting up additional RAM modules always gives the best result.

Parallel Processing

You can process multiple volumes simultaneously, but only if they are located on different hard-disks. Processing multiple volumes located on the same hard-disk will increase processing time significantly.

Example:

  • Hard-disk 1 contains volumes C: and D:
  • Hard-disk 2 contains volumes G: and H:

You can start one UltraDefrag session to process volumes C: and D: and a second separate session to process volumes G: and H:
This will result in less time needed to process all four volumes. If both hard-disks are occupied in a similar way the time will be reduced to about 50% compared to the time needed for all volumes to be processed one after the other.

Caveats

Highly fragmented volumes will have to be defragmented several times until you will see an improvement.


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