Defragging is like putting air in your tires. It’s something you need to do every once in a while, but it’s awfully tedious. Windows comes with a defragging tool, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ones out there. Certainly, there are great commercial-grade defrag utilities, but we like free. Auslogics Disk Defrag is a small, fast and free tool to handle your drive defragmenting needs hard drives, flash drives and even USB keys. So why do we like it? It really does seem noticeably faster than the stock defrag tool.

So why do we even need to defrag a drive? Windows likes to split files in pieces and scatter those bits all over the drive. The more fragmented your hard drive is, the more work your hard drive needs to do to gather the data. This lessens the lifespan of your hard drive and slows your system down. PCTechBytes recommends defragging quarterly for average users, monthly for power users. Defragging too much is not advisable, as it can also lessen the life of your hard drive due to excessive wear and tear.

So give Auslogics Disk Defrag a try. If you don’t like it, you can always uninstall.

Major brand name hard drive manufacturers will usually include software with the purchase of a new drives. This software can help you partition, copy files from the old drive to the new drive, or even diagnose problems with your disk. We are including a list of the major hard drive manufacturers and the software they prvide for download. If you have any of these drives, make sure you perform the download and keep the disk in a safe place in the event your hard drive experiences problems in the future.

Major Brand Name Hard Drive Manufacturers

Western Digital – Data Lifeguard

Maxtor – MaxBlast

Seagate – SeaTools

Some of these drives may also have free backup software or drivers that you should also get. Visit the respective websites and browse their downloads areas for any software that might be available for those drives.

Other HDD Utilities We Recommend

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBaN) is a program you burn to disk and use to compeltely erase your hard drive. DBaN will make numerous passes across your drive, writing ones and zeros, until the contents are completely erased. Great tool if you’re disposing of the drive and are worried about security.

Cleanup Assistant is a program that helps you find and remove duplicate files, as well as locate large files that are taking up a lot of space on your hard drive. It also has a file shredder similar to DBaN.

Partition Magic is a commercial program by Symantec that allows you to move partitions without destroying data. This is called a non-destructive partitioning. Typically, if you wanted to make two partitions out of one, you would have to delete the large partition and create two. With partition Magic, you can simply resize the large one and create a second partition without losing data.

Get More Software Downloads Here