UltraDefrag is the first open source disk defragmenter for Windows which supports defragmentation of system locked files by running during the Windows boot process. Actually all files including registry hives and pagefile can be defragmented at Windows boot time.
Also one of the primary goals of the UltraDefrag design is doing the job as fast as possible.
UltraDefrag has the following features:
UltraDefrag runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, including all 64 bit versions of Windows. NT 4.0 Alpha is not supported currently. ReactOS and Wine aren't supported yet because they have no defragmentation API implemented at this moment.
The following filesystems can be defragmented by UltraDefrag: FAT12/16/32, NTFS; UDF (on Vista and later systems).
There are few system restrictions which applies to the disk defragmentation. Unfortunately UltraDefrag cannot walk away these restrictions:
Never try to run UltraDefrag on NTFS v1.2 formatted volumes under Windows NT 4.0, because this may crash your system. NTFS 1.2 had a beta status and an appropriate system driver was not reliable.
The use of disk defragmentation is not recommended on flash memory or solid-state drives (SSD), as it may reduce the lifespan of the drive. As flash memory does not rely on physical movement to read the drive, random file access is much faster than a mechanical hard drive, so defragmentation is not necessary.
Floppy drives defragmentation is not recommended because it always reduces the lifespan of the floppies.
It is recommended to exclude from defragmentation as much files as possible - this will dramatically decrease the defragmentation time. Temporary files and archives usually are rarely accessed and may be left fragmented without a noticeable system performance degradation.
It is also highly recommended to disable the Windows paging file. It expands RAM, but works much slower therefore highly decreases the system performance. If more RAM is needed than physically installed, setting up additional RAM modules always gives the best result.
On highly fragmented volumes you will have to defragment several times until you will see any improvement.
UltraDefrag uses the following three algorithms:
The multipass disk optimization algorithm is very effective, even on disks which have a low amount of free space.
Another advantage of the described optimization algorithm over more complicated algorithms is taking relatively small amount of time.
Unfortunately the volume optimization algorithm works only on NTFS volumes, because FAT directories are not moveable.
On the other hand, NTFS volumes are often logically splitted to few parts by files which cannot be moved ($MFT and others). Therefore it may be sometimes impossible to become a very large continuous free space area for, let's imagine, pagefile defragmentation. For such cases there are two workarounds available:
Note that UltraDefrag always skips files living directly in MFT records (these files usually have size below 1kb), because they are actually a part of MFT. Also files which have no content are skipped, because actually there are no clusters on disk belonging to them. Additionally, UltraDefrag never tries to defragment files marked as temporary by applications which created them. Because such files will be deleted soon, therefore they will not decrease a system performance.
The Ultra Defragmenter's home page is at: http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net
Please be sure to visit this site for information, documentation, tutorials, news, etc. All UltraDefrag related things are available from there.
For help requests visit our forum: http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/forum
Please report all problems and bugs via our bug tracker: http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/bugs
To participate in UltraDefrag translation visit please WikiSpaces.com.
The most recent version of this handbook can be obtained from program's SVN repository. Download an archive, unpack it somewhere, run Doxygen tool and copy all files from the /rsc subdirectory to /doxy-doc/html. After these steps open in your browser /doxy-doc/html/index.html to view the latest version of the documentation.