what is the best hard drive defragment program?

I personally prefer one of the fully automatic utilities that can be set to run in the background. They need no scheduling and can also defrag very well under low free space plus have a nice GUI.

Best Defrag Software

Let Windows handle it. The benefits of defrag are greatly exaggerated.

Edit: I have many clues, grasshopper. This is a controversial topic with many different conclusions. No one has said it's unnecessary, just that the benefits are greatly exaggerated.

"My favorite oft repeated quote from PC World.

When the PC World Test Center set out to determine the effectiveness of the defrag utilities in our set of suites, plus that of Diskeeper 8 from Executive Software, our analysts found no evidence that defragmentation enhanced performance. On a desktop system from the PC World office with a heavily used, never-defragmented hard drive, the lab conducted speed tests using a range of applications before and after defragmenting the drive with each utility. In the end, the Test Center saw no significant performance improvement after defragmenting with any program. This result flies in the face of the received wisdom that fragmentation hinders performance, though much older PCs (with slower and smaller hard drives) and heavily used servers may benefit more from defragging.

We used to say that defragging would speed up a system, but with today's larger, faster hard drives, that no longer seems true.

The PC World Test Center's tests reveal that defraggers don't actually improve performance. And Steve Gibson, president of PC consulting firm Gibson Research Corporation, confirmed our findings"

domicile windows personal defrag is the ideal. To make it faster ensure their aren't any classes operating contained in the heritage. (use/press ctrl+alt and protecting them down hit the del key) all the progs that arise must be ended except for explorer. doing away with those means the defrag isn't having to restart everytime a software queries it

Defraging itself might not improve the speed of the drive, however most modern hard drives are constantly doing error correction (ECC). If a part of the hard drive hasn't been read in two years the hard drive has no idea that the data is fading. By running a disk defrager you force the hard drive to examine it'self and re-write fading sectors. The only way PC World could test multiple defrag software is to clone the drive of a computer and test each product. Well the cloned drive has freshly laid bits that don't need as much error correction. Thus they would only see the original benefit of defraging. That's my theory at least.

I would stick with windows defrag software any other defrag software could screw up your registry.