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deb93
18-08-08, 12:06 AM
Trying the evaluation copy of Paragon Total Defrag 2009 I found some major issues:

(1) Extremly slow. The defragmentation of a 60GB NTFS-system-partition (laptop; partition encrypted with truecrypt) lasted nearby eight (8!!!) hours.

(2) No possibility to interrupt the defragmentation once it runs. Pressing the ESC or Ctrl-C-Key opens a window explaining that an interruption will lead to data corruption. Hence the computer is blocked and can no longer be used for a significant period. Additionally this does not improve trust into the software.

(3) "Time to finish"-information: It does not improve trust into a software starting with an indication of some minutes for the "time to finish" and then counting up until hours are indicated.

(4) Status output not useful / insufficient: The status output is very minimalistic (only a progress bar) and gives absolutely no clue about what the program does. This does not improve trust into the program. Additionally the "log text output" may be interesting; nevertheless it is useless, because if there is output it scrolls to fast to be read and you can not scroll up to read.

(5) Truecrypt "shot" by total defrag: The headers (mbr etc.) of a system partition encrypted with truecrypt are "shot" by the boot-mechanism of total defrag. This leads to a non-accesibility of the system partition. After a repair with the truecrypt rescue CD grub is shot. So significant work and time is necessary to restore the system to be useable again.

Conclusion: A defragmentation software being extremly slow and having no possibility to interrupt the defragmentation process is unuseable :(. My advice to Paragon is to take those issues serious and to improve the product.

bmw307
18-08-08, 04:10 PM
Totally agree with deb93.
8 hours for a 66GB with 12GB free, Wouldn't start with only 2GB free.
Time to finish a joke.
Over an hour to analyse NTFS.
Saw a message "press any key to continue" when I eventually came back to machine to check on progress - fortunately there seems to have been an automatic "continue".
No way to look back at logfile to see what happened earlier once small display area has filled up. Logfile needs to be written to disk and displayed once defrag is complete and machine has finished rebooting.
No indication of amount of drive defragged or data rate (thinks... perhaps because it was so slow it was too embarrassed to say!)
Can't even Analyse without a reboot - XP doesn't need one to analyse.
After running and eventually booting into Windows, display showed first half of drive fragment free, but second half with lots of red blocks ie fragmented. Looking at it with XP defrag showed that it had indeed been successful in defragging the whole drive. Presumably it can't even check a partition correctly once it has supposedly defragged it.

This was a freebie with PC World magazine. Presumably it was given to promote interest in other Paragon software. If this is indicative of the quality of Paragon software, I think you have shot yourselves in the foot!

I have now removed this software from my machine.

Regards,

bmw307