Auslogics Disk Defrag: Test, Tutorial and Review

We took a critical look at Auslogics Disk Defrag Free and the trial version of the paid Ultimate version. During the setup of the free version, it is noticeable that the sending of anonymous information for product improvement is switched on. We deactivated this by removing a checkmark. The installer is adware-infested and advertises other software from the manufacturer; we declined to set up Auslogics Driver Updater with one click. At the end of the installation the tuning tool starts automatically. A table of the partitions appears at the top, and external data carriers are also listed. A tick in the “SSD” column indicates that conventional defragmentation is prohibited here. By right-clicking on the storage space entries, you can check, among other things, the degree of fragmentation; the information is given in percent. The numbering also works with SSD drives, but you should avoid defragmenting them. The context menu offers the further options “Defragment”, “Defragment & Optimize” (chargeable) and “Fast Defragmentation”. There is also drive error checking; it does not open any program-specific function, but calls up a command line window and loads the Windows on-board tool chkdsk.exe (Check Disk) in the background. Abelssoft’s CheckDrive is similar in this regard.

On the plus side, you can specify in the settings to skip fragments and files during tuning that are larger or smaller than a specified value. Another option moves system files to the top of the hard drive, which moves frequently used files to the faster part of the drive, speeds up HDD access to it, but lengthens the defragmentation process. If this is activated with a check mark, the option “Optimize file placement through prefetch layout” can be activated. On the basis of prefetch information (or its layout.ini file), according to a response to a press inquiry to O&O a few years ago, O&O Defrag Professional also did this. If you would like to have Auslogics Disk Defrag with you on a USB stick, you can use “Portable Version> Create Portable Version” to create an executable (German-language) application (disk-defrag-portable.exe) from the program that can be run without installation.

Two interesting functions in the context menu of partitions are reserved for Auslogics Disk Defrag Ultimate: a disk cleanup before defragmentation and “Optimize SSD” for flash media. Whether HDD or SSD: In the lower area you will find tabs on the disk temperature, SMART values, an assessment of the “health” and technical internals such as the drive serial number. The reported temperature roughly coincided with the specification of the hardware analysis program Speccy, but was inhomogeneous. Our test SSD has three partitions on which Windows 7 / 8.1 / 10 reside in a multi-boot environment. From the operating system’s point of view, the partitions are a “logical” division of the drive; however, all partitions are the same disk and even if the test system booted Windows 10 21H1 from one partition, the other partitions should be indicated as being just as hot. Nevertheless, the Auslogics program attested slightly different degrees Celsius values ​​for two partitions. Apparently, an analysis of (here SSD) partitions causes the reported temperature to rise permanently.

Like SSD optimization, offline defragmentation is not available for free – unlike IObits Smart Defrag. This offers both trimming of SSDs and offline tuning. In Auslogics Ultimate, the latter includes rearranging MFT files, swap files, hibernation files and registry files. With Auslogics Disk Defrag Ultimate, this is done either the next time or every time the system is started. If you have an SSD, you don’t need any optimization here; The operating system components mentioned are located on the SSD partition C: and usually not on a data hard disk (which in turn does not accommodate Windows).