I was going to DL and try this but one look at the developer’s description has me running for the hills: hard drive fragmentation can occur anywhere and at any time, regardless of the actual nature / content of a sector’s data, so pretending that somehow, in some way, this software is ‘optimized’ for one mode or another is utter nonsense.

Fall for it if you will — and that time-limited license period, too, when of course a commercial software of this type should have no such time-crippling at all — but as for me, thanks GOTD, but definitely, no thanks. This particular developer would seem to have a great deal to learn about how computers actually work — and how gullible people actually are.

However, if it is to pay for something, for almost the same price, then the best alternative is to pay for the best: Diskeeper. Because it is fully automatic. You never need to access it to perform manual defrags or schedule anything! Your computer always (note it: Always) will be around 0.5% fragmentation!

Why does fragmentation matter?… Data’s stored in files, & files are stored in small chunks of data. In ideal circumstances it’s like lining up glasses & filling each one from a pitcher until the pitcher’s empty. If you got out too few glasses you have to walk across the room to get more. And ideally your guests also bring back all the glasses so you don’t have to wander about the room to find them all. When Windows writes a file to disk ideally there’s enough empty spaces right next to each other that it can *pour* all the file’s data into them, which also makes it nice when Windows reads that file, since it doesn’t have to wander all over looking for a piece here, a piece there. That’s what happens when a std. drive is badly fragmented — pieces of files are scattered all over the place rather than sitting next to each other in a nice row. Because you have to physically move the read/write heads towards the center & back, time’s wasted, lost every time those heads have to jump around looking for empty spaces to write files, & it takes longer too, looking for the individual pieces that can be assembled into a file. De-fragmenting [defragging] a std. hard drive/partition is just organizing all those pieces of files so the drive doesn’t waste so much time finding the ones it needs.

When files are stored in memory chips [i.e. SSD drives, USB sticks, memory cards...] there are no read/write heads moving about, so it doesn’t matter whether 1 chunk of a file’s data is here, while another is stored at the other end of the chip, or on another chip entirely. In fact engineers design these devices to move things around a bit — flash memory chips wear out, so if you only use the same portion of the same chip constantly, that portion will wear out sooner, rendering the entire device useless, even if all the other portions are fine. [That was The Big concern when Microsoft introduced ReadyBoost, & they in fact did considerable work to make sure it didn't wear out USB sticks prematurely.]

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Error Checking…
Win8 has a new procedure which is pretty nice. Otherwise chkdsk is chkdsc, Windows’ built-in error checking that you perform whenever there’s a crash and files may not have been completely written to storage. Typically you right-click a drive letter in Windows’ Explorer, click Properties, go to the Tools tab, click the Check now button under Error-checking, & that’ll open a small window with 2 check boxes — ONLY check the top one, Automatically fix file system errors! DO NOT check the 2nd box, Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors!

When I earlier said data’s stored in small chunks, a Sector is one of those chunks — a device’s storage is divided up into clusters & sectors. These small sections of storage can go bad, which isn’t as catastrophic as it might be because drives normally have a few spares — in fact your drive probably is using one or more of these *spares* from the factory to make up for original defects. If you have or suspect you have one or more bad sectors use software from the drive manufacturer to fix it. If you use Windows to try & fix it, it’ll mark any bad sectors as bad, which is difficult to change, even after you’ve fixed it by running OEM software, even if you move [clone] everything to a new drive. You can get around it by copying the partition using Paragon or EaseUS apps, but then you have to move partitions around so the copied partition is where you need it.

The reason you have to get rid of NTFS file tables with sectors marked as bad is that with that designation, an Awful lot of software will not run — you may not be able to ever defrag or even backup that partition again otherwise, nor alter that partition’s size etc.

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Clean up…
The only cure for junk you’ve left lying around is to get rid of it yourself when you no longer want or need it — no software can look at a folder or folders full of stuff you’ve downloaded from Youtube & decide what stays & what goes. Beyond that most software uses the 2 Temp folders in Windows — use Windows’ own Disk Cleanup for that, plus you can get rid of .dmp [dump] files, & old Windows’ setup files too, along with shadow copies &/or Restore Points if you like. Microsoft.com also has info on how to get rid of setup & backup files for things like service packs. Before a defrag or disk/partition image backup it helps to get rid of those shadow copies & Restore Points along with any VHDs [or other format virtual disks like .vdi], copying them somewhere else of course unless you no longer need them. Depending on the software you use you can also boot to another copy of Windows to perform a defrag or backup, so you might delete hiberfil.sys & pagefile.sys, making for less data your defrag or backup software has to deal with.

Software for cleaning up disk space may call the same Windows’ functions you’ll see in Disk Cleanup, & usually also searches your drive/partition for filename extensions commonly used for temporary files, e.g. .tmp &/or .bak.