Someone reviewed v on Jul 5, 2022

Pros: 555

Cons: 555

Bottom Line: 555

Plumber reviewed v3.0 on Jan 20, 2011

Excellent. Love it. For me it's preferable to all the freeware defraggers, and even the commercial defraggers like PerfectDisk. Simple and effective, and reasonably priced. I use the Workstation Edition, which lets me monitor/defrag other computers on my LAN.

Undesired Username reviewed v3.0 on Dec 17, 2008

I really like O&O, but it's too buggy for me. I like the way mst Defrag works. Simple (very simple), effective, and reasonably priced.

There is a lot of room for improvement. I'd like to have more control over how background defragging is handled. And certainly better documentation.

Raxco is very fond of saying that background defraggers (of which mst Defrag is the original) put undue stress on hardware and resources. That argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I've used mst Defrag enough to know that it doesn't make the disk churn constantly; it merely defrags files as it needs to, but only when it needs to. When you do things "the Raxco way", you end up moving files around a lot, all at one time. So, all you really do is save up the same amount of "disk churning and resource usage" to occur all at once.

jywalt reviewed v2.0 Beta 2 on Apr 5, 2007

I've used Diskeeper, Perfect Disk, O&O Pro; none reduce your defrag needs to a simple and effective program like this one. The cost factor if you’re a repeat customer makes total sense. I’ve had Magical Defrag and Ultimate Defrag 1.48, and found the later below expectations. I say the hype with Diskeeper and the rest of the name brands might be worth it , but mst Defrag is one of the best defrag programs dollar for dollar that’s available, it’s a gem for $9.99.

comeoffit reviewed v1.9.30.76 on Jul 30, 2006

I couldn't help but fall in love with mst Defrag. I love it for what it is not, even more than for what it is. By this I mean that it is not yet another stupid defrag utility that shouts idiotic-sounding gimmicks at you, like "SuperArrange Technology!" or "Max-Accel Optimization!". It skips all that meaningless crap.

It also skips the part where you're required to set up defrag schedules, or come back to the computer only to find a defrag running, slowing everything down.

mst Defrag won't run when your computer is running on battery power. The I/O Guard feature works; I've tested it. mst Defrag does a good job putting Windows XP boot and startup files at the front of the disk; I've tested it. And if you configure it so (i.e. MoveModifiedFilesToEnd = 1), it correctly moves recently-modified files to the end.

Two points: mst Defrag isn't as good at consolidating free space as PerfectDisk is, and nor does it support offline defrags, like PerfectDisk does. But neither point matters much. For one thing, free space consolidation doesn't matter much when the defrag engine is running at all times. And on the second point, the few bits of NTFS metadata that can't be defragged online don't change much anyway, and defragging them doesn't help performance besides.

Very highly recommended.

Reposed reviewed v1.9.30.76 on Jan 10, 2006

This is the most outstanding defragmentation program I have used.

I've tried Diskeeper and O & O defraggers but found their automatic mode tended to cut in and over-utilised disk access and processor resources at inappropriate times i.e when downloading very large files. This seriouly affected download speeds.

I recently used Dirms and Buzzsaw and while quite effective, this free "on the fly" defragmenter still left fragments and an occasional defragmentation was still necessary.

I installed mst Defrag 10 days ago and have downloaded about 5 gigs of files, deleted about 3gigs, and installed/uninstalled a number of software. Every time I analysed my disk using Windows defrag there were no fragmented files! I'm seriously impressed. And I have not even noticed it running at all - it seems to be a very low resource user.

At $16 for the home edition, I can't see any reason for not recommending it.

precurgent reviewed v1.8.30.67 on Dec 18, 2005

The splash screen can be disabled. Set DisableSplashScreen (DWORD) to 1. This is described in the help file. Agreed that these settings really should be accessible via GUI.

Brian49 reviewed v1.8.30.67 on Dec 1, 2005

The overall score of 3.2/5 definitely undervalues this neat and imaginative program. As others have said, it works perfectly in the background, and with a tiny footprint. One point off for the absence of options in the GUI, and for the non-optional splash screen (I always dislike those).

kapro reviewed v1.8.30.67 on Nov 18, 2005

I have tried them all: O&O, Perfect Disk, Voptxp. I own and use at the moment Diskeeper 9 Home.
MST defragments in the background ( you can also defragment manualy) and does this efficiently (I test this with DK analyses) and safely, this contrary to some of the others. No window error reports. Furthermore it does not slow down my system when working in the background; it is hardly noticable doing its job. It does not conflict with Kaspersky Personal. (Diskeeper’s automatical defrag "set and forget" does not work wit KAV and when running "set and forget" in combination with other AV, DK slows down my system to a crawl).
Some people will feel MST lacks some features. I do not miss bells and whistles I never use.
Martin STiemerling has done a great job. Great product.

httpd.confused reviewed v1.8.30.67 on Nov 17, 2005

First of all, mst Defrag Home Edition is $15.90, not $29.00. The only difference between the Home Edition and the Workstation Edition is that the former lacks network support.

Regarding DIRKES comments: Can you explain what you mean by working "effectively"? I very much doubt it. I assume you are referring to the way that O&O Defrag tries to arrange files by date, name, or whatever, but that is complete nonsense anyway. Arranging files in that manner doesn't speed anything up, but it can make each defrag take much longer, since files have to be moved out of the way due to the change of order.

For example, if your files are arranged like this:

FILE01
FILE03
FILE04
FILE05

And then a new file named FILE02 is created (or an existing file is so renamed), O&O Defrag has to move all files from FILE03 onward, to insert FILE02.

[b]FILE01

DIRKES reviewed v1.8.30.67 on Oct 18, 2005

OO-Defrag works more effectively than 'mst defrag'. Support is available in German and English. The gui from 'mst defrag' does not offer sufficient attitudes, in order to work meaningfully.

httpd.confused reviewed v1.8.27.58 Beta 1 on Jul 2, 2005

Jeremy, I'd expect you to know that mst Defrag uses the NT defrag APIs, and is therefore as safe as any other defragger that does. The thing to be nervous about is offline defrags, and as I write this, that's one feature not yet implemented here.

Guti, comparing mst Defrag with PageDefrag makes no sense. PageDefrag does an offline defrag of registry hives, paging file(s), and event logs. That's it.

I rate mst Defrag with a 4 here because they still haven't put a GUI on the damned options, instead forcing the user to edit the registry for every little thing. That's just retarded.

jcollake reviewed v1.8.27.58 Beta 1 on Jun 27, 2005

Decent idea, to defragment in the background as files become fragmented. Poorly implemented. Defragmentation software should be something you place considerable trust in.. and I just don't trust this software in its current state. Hopefully it will get better with time.

guti reviewed v1.8.27.58 Beta 1 on Jun 26, 2005

Pagedefrag from Sysinternals is free.

WhiteZero reviewed v1.8.27.58 Beta 1 on Jun 25, 2005

Like I'll pay $30 for something Windows XP dose anyway...

httpd.confused reviewed v1.5.29.42 Beta 4 on Jan 2, 2005

Just one correction to roj's statements: On Windows XP and later, any defragger that uses the native APIs* can move the MFT (and most of the NTFS metadata), and this includes not just mst Defrag, but also the built-in defragger.

* I no longer know of any defraggers that don't use the APIs--Symantec's Speed Disk was a holdout for quite awhile, using a custom method of accessing files--but even they have come around.

roj reviewed v1.5.29.42 Beta 4 on Jan 2, 2005

OK, I'll weigh in on this one. I recall the folks who said that NTFS does not fragment so no defragger was necessary.

They're liars.

All file systems fragment - period. If you have a look at your drive after a standard Windows XP install, you'll find it scattered all over Hell's Half Acre. That's bad. It gets worse. If you're continually writing and deleting files, the scattering gets worse, especially if those files are several megabytes in size. Modern hardware can NOT cope with this – if a mainframe's disk packs can't cope I can assure you that a $100 disk drive can't. Over time, things WILL get slower.

The defrag utility shipped with Windows XP is quite acceptable for the average user. It is in fact a scaled down version of Executive Software's Diskeeper. Using Scheduler, you can perform a nightly defrag with will keep things humming along nicely (and no, you don't need a script – you can do it using the standard Scheduler interface). That defrag won't un-scatter the MFT, cluster your directory entries together or do any of the glitzy functions that the third party defraggers do but it *will* help the situation. If you feel that you have to spend money or have a tendency to flog your drive, then you start looking at a third party defragger such as this one. I personally have gone with Executive Software's Diskeeper for several versions now and find it to be one of the better ones. However, the machine I'm typing this on runs the nightly event I discussed earlier. In short, a third party defragger isn't mandatory unless you're really beating up on your drive but ANY defragger is a value added software component and any claim to the contrary is pure and utter rubbish, never mind the claims of “testing”. For example, my other box which is continually downloading stuff and thus has drives which see more action than the backseat of a Volkswagen on Saturday night has Diskeeper 9 installed on it but it's set to perform a nightly defrag rather than their miserable “Smart Defrag” since that feature is more of an imposition than a help.

Finally, the concept that there is a reason why Explorer and Notepad haven't been replaced is simply and easily debunked with a hard dose of reality:

Most users are cattle and don't know / don't want to know / don't know how to find out about anything better. Politically incorrect? Assuredly. True? Undoubtedly. I've been in this business a while and have at various points been responsible for small LANs and not-so-small WANs of 10K users and the average user is largely ignorant of “the box”. They want “the button” which is the single thing that they can press that will get their job done and aren't interested in the bits and bytes. THAT is why the majority still use Explorer and Notepad: They Don't Know Any Better.

This product is like any other of the myriad options out there ranging from Executive Software, to O&O Defrag, on down. It adds value to your installation. It will keep performance from degrading over time. It will do so relatively unintrusively and with a minimum of fuss. For some of us (Those Who Know as opposed to Those Who Don't And Don't Care To Find Out) that will be enough to evaluate it and perchance to purchase it.

Four stars for a decent work-in-progress.

Edit:

Thanks to httpd.confused for the correction. :)

httpd.confused reviewed v1.5.21.49 Beta 3 on Dec 8, 2004

If you think that Internet Explorer and Notepad "do the job fine", that says it all right there.

The simple fact is that for me, the built-in WinXP defragger makes using the system during a defrag untenable. It also butts heads with my anti-virus scanner. Schedule it for off-hour times, using your script? I work from home, and there is no such thing as an "off-hour time".

Regarding defragging and performance benefit: The accurate way to put it is that there is a performance penalty for *not* defragging. Of course there won't be much benefit if the partition is only 2% fragmented. But if, like many, it is 20% or more fragmented, there will be a significant benefit. Defragging is maintenance, nothing more. So, it becomes a task of finding the best solution to carry out this maintenance. Lots of people are fine with the lame built-in defragger. But to dismiss a utility that defrags with zero interruption to the user, and without dragging the system down even while it works, is really goofy.

mst Defrag does lack some nice features of competing utilities, such as PerfectDisk's offline-defrag feature. And it's still a beta, so some bugs are still in there. But its unique approach is something I find pretty cool indeed.

mjm01010101 reviewed v1.5.21.49 Beta 3 on Dec 8, 2004

That is silly. I've tried defrag manager, seen as one of the best scripted defrag utilities, across atestbed of 300 workstations, and we ran performance benchmarks for typical office work and saw *no* difference in performance. We opted not to go with that, and we ended up saving over $10,000 for a potentially much larger rollout. Third party defrag utilities have been a joke ever since XP came out and it's scriptable. Not that defragging helps much on modern hardware with gobs of free space. Show me some benchmarks to the contrary. In 99% of cases defragging has no performance benefit at all.

There is a reason many programs haven't replaced explorer or notepad: they are included on every copy of Windows and they do the job fine. (or name your favorite linux dist, you use the tools that work best.)

The following script will defrag every drive on your system, drop it in scheduled tasks and never worry again:
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Dim fso, d, dc
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set dc = fso.Drives
For Each d in dc
If d.DriveType = 2 Then
Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)
End If
Next

Set WshShell = Nothing

httpd.confused reviewed v1.5.19.49 Beta 2 on Nov 4, 2004

What a perfectly idiotic thing to say. I'm sure the "reviewer" below me felt really cool about leaving such a sarcastic comment, but by that reasoning, there is no reason to use any third-party text editor, since we have Notepad, any third-party FTP client, since we have Explorer's "Network Neighborhood", nor any third-party browser, since we have the illustrious Internet Explorer.

Another thing our resident comedian forgot is that not everyone has only a C: partition. I happen to have eight partitions in total, including several virtual volumes. The built-in Windows defragger is a total piece of trash for my needs.

The fact is that mst Defrag brings to the playing field a novel and great concept in defragmenting: Instead of going hours, days, or weeks with significant fragmentation, the problem is handled almost immediately, without bogging down the system, or demanding your attention at all.

This means you'll never have to run a manual defrag again, and you won't have to screw around with inconvenient defrag schedules, either. You also won't have a defragger running in the background, slowing the system down to a crawl.

But you also won't have any performance issues caused by fragmentation after installing large software packages, such as 3D games, because it's all handled automatically for you. Basically, mst Defrag runs in the background, as a service. If it sees files added or changed to a monitored partition, it quickly determines if the time is optimal to defragment them (i.e. based on system load). If so, it handles it right away, but still without grinding everything else to a halt. Find that kind of functionality and design sensibility in one of the "all-or-nothing" competitors.

Another cool thing, according to what I'm told, is that an upcoming beta of mst Defrag will handle Windows XP's LAYOUT.INI files the same way that PerfectDisk does--by moving the files to an optimal place on the partition.

Why do I sound like an advertisement? Because I've tried all the others, and I got totally SICK of screwing around with them.

mjm01010101 reviewed v1.5.19.49 Beta 2 on Nov 4, 2004

start-->run-->defrag c:
minimize window.

There, I saved you a download.

Richardky reviewed v1.5.19.49 Beta 2 on Nov 4, 2004

windows should of come with this one does as stated -defrags windows in the background always without you ever knowing or slowing your system
or bothering your daily tasks - very good indeed