PerfectDisk 12 to Offer Enhanced Solid State Drive Optimisation

By on May 10, 2011 in News, Software, Windows Home Server

Raxco’s popular disk defragmentation app PerfectDisk 12 is set to be released next month, and the company this week confirmed to us that there will again be a dedicated release for Windows Home Server – PerfectDisk 12 Home Server. That edition is part of a family of products whose focus stretches from PCs in the home all the way to Enterprise servers in the workplace – but what’s new this time around?

Looks like Raxco has been focusing on solid state drives (SSDs) this year – PerfectDisk 12 includes a new feature to optimise SSD performance and longevity. Announcing the product today, the company said:

Due to the nature of flash memory and how data is currently written, SSD write performance degrades over time.  Unlike a hard disk drive, any write operation to SSD storage requires not one step, but two: an erase followed by the actual write. In order to maximize performance and SSD life it is important to decrease the number of writes/updates to the SSD and be sure that any sort of optimization pass performed on the SSD does as little “shuffling” of files and data as possible.

The new requirement for managing SSDs is a disk optimizer that can identify which drives are SSDs and which are traditional hard drives and then perform the appropriate actions for each drive.

With the upcoming PerfectDisk 12, a new SSD Optimize method focuses exclusively on what matters for performance to SSDs. Intelligent analysis is performed automatically and then utilizes sophisticated free space placement algorithms to provide peak SSD performance and better protect investments. Raxco Software draws upon its pioneering work with free space consolidation to ensure optimal SSD performance. The technology intelligently minimizes “writing” to the SSD – which maintains SSD performance over the long term. It’s all done automatically and will be included as a standard feature in all editions of PerfectDisk 12.

“The benefit PerfectDisk 12 provides to those customers using SSDs is that PerfectDisk 12 is able to intelligently identify the SSDs and not perform a traditional defrag on those drives,” says Greg Hayes, Manager of Technical Solutions, Raxco Software. “Not only that, the new PerfectDisk 12 SSD optimization method is able to consolidate free space while minimizing the number writes to the disk. The result is better write optimization and reduced overall disk wear.”

Raxco also announced “OptiWrite”, a feature which is said to prevent disk fragmentation in real-time, (which competes directly with Diskeeper Corporation’s similarly-focused IntelliWrite technology) alongside improvements in RAM utilisation.

 


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.
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  • davepermen

    ssd optimisations, heh.. welcome to snakeoil land.

    btw, ssds DON'T degrade over time, if they have trim support, which most have by now (about products created and or sold in 2010 and 2011).

    get over it, perfectdisk, this is not the business for you. continue to defrag harddrives.

    • urmaster

      Not going to buy you anywhere near the level of performance increase a HDD defrag can but it probably can help (sequential reads are still faster on SSDs).

      Life of an SSD isn't a concern for most anyway, by the time it wears out to a noticeable level I'm sure it will be long out the door.

      Old drives wont have TRIM, Raid can't have TRIM and some OS's don't support TRIM.

      Still getting this i've got at least 2 dozen platters still in my house I'm sure they'll have use of this.

      • davepermen

        the trick is, none of that is worth paying for that tool, as for data drives, defragmentation is low anyways, for ssds, performance difference is negitible, and there are enough defragmentation tools out there that can handle it just as well for free. defraggler for example.

        and even if you don't have trim, it's best to let the ssd just be. every ssd (that's worth a penny) optimizes itself in some way, perfectdisk will just interfer there by changing the access patterns.

        spending money for perfectdisk is, thus, rather useless.

        i'll use defraggler about once a year on my home server, and that's about it. (system disk of whs is an ssd, too.. and the datadisks are seriously not a fragmentation problem. on whs2011, you could just move a folder from one disk to another to get it mostly defragmented.. doesn't it defragment itself like win7 actually? hmm)

        • gabriel

          the ssd optimisation that raxco sells while it wont improve performence it does reduce wear and tear by compacting free space ive tested the beta (ive got 2 computurs same hardeware purchesed 2010 only diffrence is one has perfectdisk 12 and one doesnt (my wifes doesnt shes not into beta testing software)

          we bought them around chrismiss the one with perfectdisk 12 write performence of ssd driver is around 1.5 percent faster when writing 20 gigabyte to it the one without perfectdisk 12 installed has slowly degraded performence even they both ssd drives have trim enabled

          the rate of degrading is so small though your only notice if you test it extensivly

          • davepermen

            1.5% performance gain means it's absolutely not noticeable.

            and no, it can't reduce wear and tear by doing actually more writes to the disk (any data moving means wear and tear).

            so most likely, what it prevents in wear and tear (and even that is questionable at best), it'll use up in wear and tear due to the data moving.

            it can't do magic. and according to how ssd work (i've 13 ssd by now, and investigating in their technology since years), they can't reduce wear and tear. that would have to be done on the controller level. any other level increases the writes automatically, and thus increases wear and tear.

            oh, and, there is no degradation of performance over time if you have trim. if you think there is, then you're measuring some other difference. you can just quickformat such a drive, and it's back to identical performance as if you bought it (but a bit less writes left, of course).

            perfectdisk can't know where and how an ssd writes data (that is hidden and non-accessible information only available to the ssd and controller itself). so it can't optimize anything.

            your 1.5% difference is most likely because the two systems are NOT identical anymore. not because of perfect disk.