Disk SpeedUp

Glaryutilities' Disk SpeedUp is a free standalone utility that analyzes, defragments, and optimizes your disk drives or individual folders. It offers manual and automatic defrag options as well as automatic shutdown after defragmenting finishes.

Like many system utilities, Disk SpeedUp has a colorful interface with large, clearly labeled buttons and tabs labeled Defrag Show and Settings. The Defrag Show tab showed our two disk drives and their capacity, free space, status, and percentage of fragmentation. In the middle was a standard defrag map, while at the bottom of the interface, Disk SpeedUp displayed tabs with our three partitions, each with individual graphs and data. To the left, three prominent buttons let us choose Defrag Now, Auto Defrag, and Schedule options. We chose both hard disks and all three partitions. We could analyze, defrag, or optimize our selected disks or folders as well as pause or stop the operation.

Disk SpeedUp claims "smart" defragmentation methods that speed up and improve the process. We can't swear to their effectiveness other than to note that this tool is certainly fast. The color-coded defrag map gave us a good visual indication of the state of our disks. We could check for updates, but there's no Help file, though the developer's Web site offered some information. Under Settings, we could change the language, integrate the program with Windows startup and context menus, set defragmentation and optimization parameters, and add files to the Exclude List. When scheduling an automatic session, we could select defrag, optimize, or both.

There's nothing wrong with the built-in Windows disk defragmentation tool, at least nothing that Disk SpeedUp won't fix, first by dramatically speeding up the defragmentation process and second by optimizing the disk by moving large files to the end of the drive and other means.