Is the Disk Defrag utility built into Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 good enough?
I see lots of 3rd party defragmentation tools out there but I'm wondering if they were meant for Windows 2003 and below?
I don't have any special fragmentation problems, I use only W2k8 R2 but would like to setup a regular schedule and I'm wondering if there's any reason to spend money on a 3rd party solution.
Thanks in advance.
I would vote for Defraggler (www.defraggler.com). It's small, easy to use and works fine for me.
If you don't have any specific problems then I would say "yes", it's plenty good enough. Most 3rd party defraggers are written to address issues with the Windows one (such as not being able to defrag certain files, like the pagefile) but if you're not experiencing these issues why would you look for a solution for a problem you don't have?
Ancient question, I know...
But I can add a data point. On a Windows 2008 R2 server that has had the weekly built in defrag scheduled task enabled for months, if not years, I decided to try contig on the data drives. There are maybe 100GB of random office environment files docs, images, etc. - and to my surprise, contig found thousands and thousands of fragments, most of them on files that haven't been edited in years. I assume the built in defrag is doing something, but I think it's worth using a 3rd party tool like contig once in a long while too.
Contig is useful.
Diskkeeper, which is one of the popular 3rd party defrag tools claims to support all editions of Windows Server 2008.
I've never had the need to pro-actively defrag windows servers. But you may have special needs.
Use the Server 2008 defrag until you go SSD. Once you get an SSD in the system you want to not defrag the volumes that are on the SSD(s).
Save your money on defrag software to buy better hardware instead.
