We Got Served

Raxco Software, the company behind PerfectDisk, has a long history of providing software solutions to its customer base.  PerfectDisk is of the few HD optimization programs that has a Windows Home Server specific version.  A brief overview of the program and history of the company is documented below.

For thirty years, Raxco Software, Incorporated has been a leading innovator and provider of system administration software, resource management and productivity solutions for medium- to large-sized organizations as well as home users around the world.

Its award-winning PerfectDisk is certified by Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. Raxco Software also makes suites of utilities for the OpenVMS operating system. Superior technology and a dedication to technical support and customer service are helping to make Raxco Software the first choice for system management and performance boosting needs.

The corporate headquarters of Raxco Software, a privately held company since its inception, is located in Gaithersburg, MD, just outside of Washington, DC. The company also maintains global sales and support presence through a network of international resellers and distributors in countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Over 25,000 companies rely on Raxco Software’s products to optimize their computer systems and networks. Global 2000 customers, including Fortune 1000 organizations and government agencies worldwide, use Raxco Software’s systems administration tools.

PerfectDisk comes in many forms, depending upon the needs of the end user.  The various flavors are as follows:

Home

• PerfectDisk^® 10 Home Edition
• PerfectDisk^® 10 Professional
• PerfectDisk^® 10 for Windows Home Server

Business

• PerfectDisk^® 10 Professional
• PerfectDisk^® 10 Server
• PerfectDisk^® 10 for Exchange
• PerfectDisk^® 10 for Virtual Enterprise Edition
• PerfectDisk^® 10 for VMware
• PerfectDisk^® 10 Enterprise Console

The version that we are interested in this review is the Windows Home Server version.  The program is available for download from the PerfectDisk website as 30-day trialware.  Just enter the required information in the appropriate fields, as seen below, and Raxco will send you an email with download instructions.

The picture shown below is for the 2008 version which has now been updated for PerfectDisk 10.

According to the company behind PerfectDisk, this program includes several new and improved features that have been incorporated into PerfectDisk 10, as documented in the following paragraphs.  For those who already have an earlier version of PerfectDisk, this might be of interest to those that are looking for a reason to upgrade.

• Microsoft Certified
  PerfectDisk 10 is certified by Microsoft for Vista and Windows Server 2008.
• Exclusive Support for Windows 7
  PerfectDisk 10 supports Windows 7.
• Improved performance
  Saving you time and resources, PerfectDisk’s engine now runs up to 30% faster.
• Smart automatic StealthPatrol
  Working during computer idle times, StealthPatrol now intelligently self-adjusts to conserve valuable system resources.
• Exclusive to PerfectDisk – Complete space management reports
  PerfectDisk offers a host of new reports that enable you to quickly analyze space distribution of file and folders.
• Faster Free Space Consolidation
  PerfectDisk’s industry-leading free space consolidation features now work faster than ever before.
• Exclusive AutoPilot Scheduling
  The most flexible scheduling of any defrag tool.
• New Unlimited Pause feature
  You can now “Pause” PerfectDisk during a defrag run for an unlimited length of time.
• Enhanced user interface
  Easier to use than ever before, PerfectDisk’s user-friendly interface includes tabbed navigation, setup wizards and graphics of your drive’s fragmented files.
• Enhanced self-diagnostics
  Enhanced self-diagnostics to detect and repair most common issues with PerfectDisk (i.e. PD registry keys deleted, PD files deleted, etc.)
• Exclusive Free Space Management
  PerfectDisk offers a host of features to help you better understand and manage the space on your drive. Easily free up wasted space, remove unnecessary duplicate files, see a graphical view of your files and directories, and get a complete set of space management reports to quickly analyze space distribution of your files and folders.
• Cumulative counters
  PerfectDisk 10 displays how many files have been defragmented and how much free space has been 
  recovered since PerfectDisk was installed.
• Enhanced self-diagnostics
  PerfectDisk 10 automatically helps repair most common issues with PerfectDisk (e.g. registry keys deleted, files deleted, etc.).
• Data store redirection
  With PerfectDisk for Exchange, users can now globally re-direct temp and working locations for data stores.  For sites with a large number of data stores, this provides for faster and more efficient ds configuration.
• Virtual machine scheduling
  With PerfectDisk for VMware, users can now schedule the optimization of virtual machines. This includes the ability for scheduled optimizations to shutdown a running virtual machine in order to perform the optimization.

Once downloaded, you can simply execute the installation program directly.  This installer will install the program so that you can open it directly from the Start menu and it will copy a console installer, so that you can access the program from the WHS console.  The complete install process is illustrated in the following screens.  Please note that I installed this program with all the default options.

At this point, PerfectDisk has copied onto your machine all the files needed to install the program.  When you click on the PerfectDisk for Windows Home Server option, the following html document pops up.

The physical location of the folders you need to copy to your Software Share can be seen below.

And the location to copy to.

Per the instructions, execute the .msi file directly.  And for your perusal, the WHS console install is documented below.

It is interesting to note that this is the only time I have seen the console not have to close after installing a WHS add-in.  When you click on the console PerfectDisk icon for the first time, you will be asked to provide certain information to PerfectDisk.

Specifically, it is at this point where enter in your License Key or indicate your preference to use the free trialware version.

And that is that.  At this point, you will have access to the PerfectDisk program inside the console.

PerfectDisk has grouped the various program features under 4 tabs located across the top of the program window.  The first tab is named ‘Defragmentation’, and can seen in the preceding picture.  This is where you can analyze, manually defragment, and view the properties of the various system drives.  You can also set the various program options under this tab.

Moving on to the next tab, ‘Autopilot Scheduling’, you will find various scheduling options and the ability to change the StealthPatrol option.  It seems that you can change program options under any of the tabs.

Moving over to the Space Management tab, you will notice PerfectDisk has the ability to perform a disk clean-up operation.  Very straightforward space reclamation options here.

Finally, the ‘Product Resources’ tab contains all the prerequisite help and support features you would expect to find in full-featured commercial program.

Overall, the layout of the console version of PerfectDisk is quite easy to navigate without being overwhelmed by trying to put too much information in front of you at one time.  The one item that I feel needs to be rethought is the drive selection area under the ‘Defragmentation’ window.  Inside the console, you have the ability to see only one drive listed at a time.  In addition, the drive naming scheme is rather cryptic, which translates to not easily knowing which physical one is looking at.  It would be nice to expand this section, at the expense of the graphical disk section, to  show 3-4 drives at a time.

Please note that if you RDC to your WHS and open the main PerfectDisk program to the desktop, the increased space available to the program allows you to see more than what is in the console window.  For many programs, it is quite a challenge to effectively place information in the limited space inside the console.  For the most part, PerfectDisk does a nice job of this.  In addition, you can have both the console version and the desktop version of PerfectDisk open at the same time.

In lieu of showing you what each item under each tab does, I will ask you to download, install, and explore each item yourself.  Exploring these items will yield a much better understanding of what each item does vs. me trying to show them to you here.

As a final side note on layout, the WHS console window is ‘famous’ for having a fixed size window.  Add-ins attempt to make the most of what is available and PerfectDisk is no exception.  However, if you look at the bottom right corner of the PerfectDisk add-in window, you may notice that you have to ability to resize this add-in inside the console.  I played with this a little bit and it worked.  Sort of.  It did not seem to resize the way I would have liked it to do so (the drive selection area noted above) and it was very slow to completely refresh the console screen.  It may not be ‘perfect’, but it is a step in the right direction.

Another option to note is that PerfectDisk has the ability to connect to other computers.  If you click on the ‘10’ icon in the top left corner, you will be presented with the options as seen below.

If you click on ‘Connect to Another Computer’, you will be presented with the following window which will allow to do just that.

Please note that if you running Windows Firewall, you will have to configure it to allow PerfectDisk to access a remote computer.  You will find instructions for this in the Help section.  Speaking of which, it is interesting to note that you can access the Help screen only from the desktop version of PerfectDisk and not from the Console version.  Clicking on the Console Help option does, well, nothing.  At least that was the situation for me.  I assume that this is a glitch that will get fixed in a program update.

And now to the area that you really want to know more about.  How well does it work?

However, before I can go into the testing section, I need to caution you regarding the results contained here and the results I obtained for PerfectDisk’s main competitor, Diskeeper.

Last Friday evening when I arrived home from work, I turned my WHS on to find massive amounts of Critical Errors and frequent Blue Screens of Death.  It took an F8 entry into my WHS and a manual deletion of a program folder (lucky guess on the offending program) to get rid of the BSoD’s.  In the end, I found 3 hard drives out of 6 gone, totaled, kaput.  One made a nice clicking sound, one I could find in Disk Management, but not format, and one could not even be recognized to that point.  Fixing my WHS, and arriving at these HD conclusions took care of most of my Friday evening.

I *had* these glorious plans to be able compare directly how PerfectDisk and Diskeeper did against each other in a follow-up article.  Oh, well, like the old saying goes: “the best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry”.  I do plan, however, to still do this comparison article.  I will, short of more failures, re-run all the following tests for both programs on identical hardware under identical conditions, to provide an apples-to-apples comparison.

Enough of the sob story…

It is somewhat unfortunate that I have previously had a defragmentation program installed on my WHS.  As the drives in this machine have been well optimized prior to beginning the review for this program, any performance increase changes that I may have gained as a result are unavailable for documentation.

In the end, the most pertinent tests that provided real-world tests (and one artificial test) for a WHS are as follows:

Client Backup: I ran a Manual Backup of this machine.  I followed this backup immediately another backup.  I then ran a third backup while PerfectDisk was performing a defragmentation run.

Run 2, PerfectDisk not defragmenting:

Run 3, PerfectDisk performing a defragmentation run:

I guess you could look at these numbers and suggest that PerfectDisk improved backup performance.  Not.  This simply suggests that backup times for 2 consecutive runs can vary somewhat, although I would ascertain that PerfectDisk has no, or minimal, impact on basic drive activities.

Performance benchmark test: I ran HD Tach on my system drive.

The results:

With PerfectDisk not defragmenting:

With PerfectDisk performing a defragmentation run:

Burst speed: 96.9% enabled vs. disabled

Random Access: 67.5% enabled vs. disabled

Average Read: 26.6% enabled vs. disabled

Based on Burst Speed performance was virtually identical.  Random Access and Average Read speed took a big hit when PerfectDisk was running.  I reran the tests again and the differentials remained about the same.  It is interesting to note, also, the Sequential Read Speed spike differentials between the two tests.  Perhaps caused by PerfectDisk doing performing disk defragmenting?

Although there appears to be a large discrepancy between the numbers obtained above and the ones I ran for Diskeeper for my other review, I will again stress that these tests were done on different drives.  In addition, this drive was 96% full while the drive I tested with Diskeeper had a minimal amount of used space.  Also, as Diskeeper works in the background, it may have not have been doing much actual defragging during that time.

Artificial Torture Test:

As I just indicated above, the major question one would have with a defrag program is how well does it work?  And how does one compare defragging abilities with another program?  Quite some time ago, I read a post over at the [H]ardforum on a program that could do just the opposite, fragment a file or files.  And when I mean fragment, I mean a shotgun fragmenting.  I copied a single file (~750Mbtyes in size) over to an empty, unattached, drive on my WHS.  I executed this program and over a significantly long period of time, the program shotgun blasted this file all over the drive.  The following picture shows how the drive looked just after I started to defragment this drive.

PerfectDisk took longer than the 1 second indicated in the following picture, but it put the drive back into tip-top shape in a reasonably short period of time.

This was quite a different set of results from the tests I performed using Diskeeper!  But, once again, I will caution you that these tests were performed under entirely circumstances.

In the end, is this program worth your time and money?   When I first installed a defrag program quite some time ago, an analysis of my drives indicated a fragmentation level of over 50%.  Today, it is substantially better than that, to put it mildly.  Is performance better?  It is unfortunate that I cannot answer this definitively.  Actually, I cannot answer that subjectively, simply because my WHS is not a machine I do normal work on.  If you read my Diskeeper review, the above may sound rather familiar.  Of course, in both cases, those are very true statements.

So again, I ask the question: Is this program worth your time and money?  To me the answer is quite simple, yes.  A defragmentation program is one of those very necessary evils that one must have.  Especially with a server that moves data around such as a WHS.

And like I indicated previously, to be continued…

Company: Raxco Software, Inc.

Version Reviewed: PerfectDisk 10 for Windows Home Server

Release Date: 27Jan2009

Cost: PerfectDisk 2008 for Windows Home Server: $49.99

PerfectDisk 2008 for Windows Home Server Site License: $99.99

PerfectDisk links:

Web site: PerfectDisk

Support: PerfectDisk Support

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