Free Disk Defrag

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 07, 2011

AML Free Disk Defrag automatically scans your brain waves...no, of course; it's a freeware disk defragmentation utility. We know what you're thinking (just kidding about the brain waves): what makes this free disk defragger different from the rest? It's compact; they're compact. It's easy to use; they're easy to use. It's fast. The others? Not so much. The difference is under the hood; AML FDD has a powerful engine and smart algorithms that make for blistering defrag speeds. It doesn't have a scheduler, the feature that compensates for the slowness of the built-in Windows disk defragger by running in the dead of night--when users bother to set it, that is.

AML FDD's dialog-style interface is clean and efficient and hard to distinguish from the rest of the class: menu bar, disk info displayed by drive letter, color-coded defrag map, controls, and a progress bar. The program displayed the file system, total and free space, percentage used, and other data about our disks, with check boxes to select volumes to analyze and defragment. We selected two drives, our 260GB C: drive and a 500GB media drive, and pressed Analyse. The process concluded so quickly that we opted to just go ahead with the defragmentation. Again, this process was so fast that we quickly went through the rest of our system's volumes. AML Free Disk Defrag analyzed and defragmented some 1.5TB of data in seven volumes spread out over three physical disks in mere minutes, and not all at once, either, but one by one, manually. Next we tried the Optimize feature on a defragmented 640GB drive. Naturally, this process took longer since it involved more than just defragmenting the data. However, it was still pretty fast by comparison, and nothing that would be taxing to wait for to finish.

One problem with most disk defraggers is that they take too long to run when you have a mind to run them, which is the only time most users bother with them. That's the other problem, actually: too many users either don't bother with the scheduler, don't keep up with it, or can't use if for other reasons like PC shutdowns, unfamiliarity, and sloth. AML FDD does its business while you wait.