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Review: Diskeeper 2009 Pro Premier with Hyperfast

Ian Williams — 2009-01-22T16:51:00.000Z

Ian Williams, vnunet.com, Thursday 22 January 2009 at 16:51:00

Hyperfast helps get the most out of solid state drives

Diskeeper recently announced the addition of Hyperfast to its Diskeeper 2009 suite, which is specifically designed to optimise the performance of solid state drives (SSDs).

Using Flash memory as opposed to spinning platters and moving heads, SSDs offer a range of benefits including very fast access times, improved robustness, reduced noise and less power consumption than their mechanical counterparts.

SSDs are not without their drawbacks, however, and questions remain over longevity and performance over time.

Basically Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles, which can limit the lifespan of an SSD. This problem is being addressed at a hardware and software level, primarily through the design of high endurance cells, better wear levelling algorithms and other improvements.

The idea behind Diskeeper's Hyperfast is to help improve the performance and extend the lifespan of SSDs by essentially forcing the file system to write sequentially rather than randomly. This cuts down on free space fragmentation, and reduces the aggregate erase-write cycles that would normally occur.

To test the Hyperfast technology we used an Asus S101 netbook with a 16GB Ultra ATA 100 solid state hard drive, running on an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU with 1Gb of DDR2 RAM.

The major architectural differences between SSDs and traditional hard drives mean that many hard drive benchmarking tools are inaccurate for testing SSDs, but because we're not comparing different drives, we settled on using HDTune and HDBench in our review.

Without having months to use the drive normally, we simulated the effect by filling the drive almost to capacity and creating a batch file to copy files of various sizes haphazardly on and off the drive which, after a few overnight runs, left us with a very fragmented drive.

In all cases we ran the benchmarks three times and averaged the results. We ran the benchmarks at four intervals: before doing anything to the system; after our simulated usage batch run; directly after installing and running Diskeeper; and after running our batch file again with Diskeeper running.

For our tests we were provided with a copy of Diskeeper 09 Premier Pro with Hyperfast. Installation and registration was quick and easy and the interface is quite straightforward. Users are presented with a list of available storage devices and each one can be individually configured to be defragmented in real time, using its Invisitasking system.

Hyperfast also provides the option to perform a defrag during the next reboot of the PC, allowing Diskeeper to access system files and other data that can't be moved while Windows is running.

The Hyperfast option is turned on automatically when the program detects an SSD drive, but there is the option of toggling it on or off in the event that it is not automatically or possibly incorrectly detected. While running, Diskeeper didn't seem to impact system performance at all and has a fairly modest memory footprint of around 18MB.

Our results were as follows:

As can be seen from the graphs our batch run was successful in hitting the performance of the drive by between 18 and 44 per cent, according to HD Bench, and between 30 and 36 per cent, according to HDTune.

After installing Diskeeper and allowing it to run a full defrag, we benchmarked the drive again and were pleased to find that performance had returned to pretty much the same level as before. We then proceeded to run our batch program again, but this time with Diskeeper running in the background.

After a few more overnight runs we ran our benchmarks for the fourth time and found that Diskeeper had managed to keep everything in order, meaning that the results were pretty consistent with those from the previous run, highlighting the program's efficiency at keeping files in order even when dealing with several simultaneous transactions.

This sort of review is always very difficult because, as with most optimisation technology, there are a lot of variables and other factors that play a part, meaning that everyone's experience will be different. However, the benefits of defragmentation are well proven, and Diskeeper is a trusted developer of storage optimisation technology.

These factors combined with the sound theory behind Hyperfast and our own findings suggest that it certainly has some merit, although the exact scale of benefit will vary substantially with the system and usage patterns of each individual case.

For those looking to maximise the performance and lifespan of their SSDs we would also strongly recommend not filling the drive past three-quarters of its capacity if it can be avoided.

Although this may seem like a waste, particularly considering the high cost of SSD drives, this gives the wear levelling algorithms and applications like Diskeeper the space required to write data in the most efficient way, thereby minimising fragmentation and limiting the number of erase-write cycles.

Review: Iolo Technologies System Mechanic Professional 8

Dave Bailey — 2008-10-14T10:49:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, vnunet.com, Tuesday 14 October 2008 at 10:49:00

All-in-one security, tune-up and system watchdog

Launched in August, version 8 of Iolo Technologies' System Mechanic Professional is an all-in-one system for giving clued-in users all they need to keep their Windows operating system secure and performing optimally.

New in this release are updated versions of Iolo's ActiveCare, DriveSense and its registry defragmentation and optimisation tool.

The first thing to note is that any third-party anti-virus (AV) systems will have to be uninstalled to run System Mechanic since it has its own AV package, and you cannot have both running simultaneously. So we had to uninstall our own AV package, Webroot’s AntiVirus with AntiSpyware & Firewall.

We installed the trial evaluation we downloaded from Iolo’s website, and installed it on both Windows XP Professional and Vista Ultimate.

The first screen users will see is an overview dashboard indicating the current health and security of the system with a dial.

The next step is to check what problems have been uncovered. Two options initially available are a quick scan and a deeper one. Choosing the quick scan took a couple of minutes and uncovered what System Mechanic said were six problems.

Firstly System Mechanic informed us that the AV system and client firewall were not running. So we turned them both on and proceeded with the next two items on the list, two Windows registry problems - some invalid references to shared dynamic link libraries; and 229MB of what it called file clutter but was in fact an un-emptied recycle bin and an un-flushed internet cache.

The other two problems identified were an un-optimised network connection and a low system memory warning.

If you need to undo any of the actions taken by System Mechanic, in the event that your system becomes unstable, the SafetyNet feature allows you to undo that specific action.

Next we decided to run a full system scan and see what System Mechanic uncovered. The full scan takes much longer than the quick scan, anything up to 15 times longer depending on the number and capacity of hard drives it has to scan.

The updated version of ActiveCare in System Mechanic 8 has a smarter engine, which Iolo says detects when users aren’t typing or using the mouse and uses system resources accordingly in the background until it detects such usage.

We could schedule ActiveCare to run every six hours, and customise it not to run at specific times, or if the system was a laptop running on battery power.

We could also stop ActiveCare from running if the CPU utilisation went above a user-definable figure – the default is set at 25 per cent. System Mechanic 8 also uses what Iolo call ZeroRAM technology, which needs less system resources than before.

The new version of DriveSense shows drive attributes taken from hard disk industry standard Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (Smart).

Smart takes data from onboard hard drive sensors installed by disk manufacturers, which DriveSense displays in real time through colour-coded gauges. For instance, checking the current status of our hard drive we could see 14 Smart parameters, including the current drive temperature, as well as seek, read and write error rates.

Another feature is an upgraded Search and Recover application, which has an enhanced DriveScrubber application with new options for cleaning files off hard drives.

For users who wish to clean drives to ensure they aren’t readable by standard search and recover tools, then this will suffice. But it may not stop people with access to dedicated hardware from being able to pull information off the drive.

System Mechanic works on several levels of user hardware expertise. There are easy to use one-click diagnostic and system correction wizards for less clued-in users, and individual tools which can be accessed by more IT-savvy users.

In conclusion, Iolo System Mechanic Pro 8 can help keep users’ Windows operating systems performing optimally, although the initial scan can take a fair amount of time.

What we think is a downside to System Mechanic is that it forces users who are probably used to their own AV system to use Iolo’s AV package. It would be much better to allow users the option of turning off Iolo’s package and allowing them to use a system they are used to.

System Mechanic 8 supports Windows 2000 and XP systems, but currently only 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. Iolo said that it is working on 64-bit versions for XP and Vista.

LIUtilities WinTasks 4 Professional

Paul Rowlingson — 2002-05-20T16:25:53.000Z

Paul Rowlingson, vnunet.com, Monday 20 May 2002 at 16:25:53

Take control of every Windows process.

This program is all about processes. It helps you differentiate between system and normal processes, increase or decrease their priority and stop them altogether, among other things.

If you are wondering what a process is at this point, then WinTasks 4 Professional probably isn't for you. However, should you still be interested, here is a brief overview.

A process is basically a form of PC activity, generally (but not solely) presented as a program execution. A process may access a number of PC resources including files, memory, disk space etc. Each process is made up of a number of threads, performing different actions within that process.

Windows supervises/controls these processes automatically. A user can take basic control over processes via the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete), but little can be done here other than stopping a process.

With a copy of WinTasks 4 more detailed control and data is available, helping system administrators to diagnose/solve problems that may occur.

On launching WinTasks you are presented with its main window, where every active process is clearly listed. Coloured icons help to differentiate between system and standard processes.

WinTasks displays each process name, location, current priority level, the number of active threads and the amount of the processor and memory each process uses.

Also present is a description field, which purports to describe the selected process. However, we often encountered the phrase 'No description available' on common, non-system processes, and when they were present they were very brief. So unless you know a lot about computer functions the descriptions are of little use.

It is within the main window that processes can be halted, increased or decreased in priority or renamed at the click of a button. Processes can be assigned with one of four priority levels: low, normal, high and real-time.

A process in real-time mode is given exclusive access to the processor. Windows 2000 and XP actually support two other priorities - below normal and above normal - but these are not present in WinTasks 4.

Up to four configurations can be saved, with relevant priority levels for all defined processes.

An Autostart window can be opened which displays all programs that auto-load at startup, and such items can be enabled/disabled. Current programs can be removed or new ones added.

A Windows window displays a list of all active windows and the process to which each corresponds. Each window can be normalised, minimised, maximised, shown and hidden.

A modules window is available to display all DLL modules for a selected process, while a statistics window displays processor and memory uses for the selected process and the whole system.

Finally, WinTasks allows for powerful scripting to be applied to a system and, with a complete list of all components to the scripting language available in the help files, this should be easy to use for those familiar with scripting.

There is practically no limit to what can be done with scripting, whether on a single machine or across a network. Examples of its uses range from the simple blocking of specific applications, to the more advanced shutting down or re-prioritising of any processes exceeding a defined amount of available resources.

In this way it is possible to exert a high level of control over a user's rights, and automatically manage resources. This is without doubt the most useful aspect of WinTasks 4 Pro, and will be where users head first.