Review: Diskeeper 2009 Pro Premier with Hyperfast

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.