What about Diskeeper?

Is this really necessary? Vista has background defrag and I hardly even notice it.

Diskkeeper is good to.

I must say those Samsung disks are an utterly stunning. I have 4 of the 500GB variety.

The are the best performing.
They are the quietest (even without changing the acustic management).
They are practically the cheapest you can buy.

I can't remember when someone else had such a killer product.

(anxiously scans headlines for "IBM deathstar" like bad news).

I'd like to see a review of the freeware jkdefrag if you get the time. Thank you.

Yeah, you ought to check with Diskeeper too. Diskeeper is very good, especially for automatic defragmentation, which seems to be more of the trend these days.

There's no replacement for a good defrag tool, but if you need more then you should try something like DataCore's UpTempo. It was originally written to speed up SANs, but also shows real performance gains on laptops and workstations.

IMHO it's money well spent.

But what about the effect of defragmentation? Isn't it more important than the time the process has taken? Honestly, i never found any noticeable difference before and after defrag in terms of system or application launch times or copy/move procedures. Given that most of the programs and the system itself consist of numerous -and very small- files and the disk head should shuffle between them anyway...?

Seconding Jkdefrag. It is free and GNU GPL.

It can easily be found using Google or Wikipedia. =)