Raxco’s PerfectDisk disk defragmentation app is one of those sweet little utilities that is truly install and forget.

Now vastly improved in Version 12, PerfectDisk retains the UOTY crown by being even better than we remembered.

For UOTY 2010, we wrote:

The Raxco PerfectDisk line of disk defragmenters is impressively extensive, from defrag product for physical disks, to those for virtual disks, even in that area with products for the two leading virtualization products, VMware and Windows Hyper-V.

A little confession: until I received the review licenses for the PerfectDisk products, I hadn’t thought of obtaining a defragmentation utility for virtual machines, always thinking, erroneously, that defragging the host would take care of defrag.

In our tests, PerfectDisk brought back an old, old concept from the early days of personal computing, albeit paraphrased: the TSR, which stands for a terminate-and-stay-resident program. In this instance, PerfectDisk, when installed, stays out of your way, using very little resources as it does its thing in the background.

Just how cool is that?

Well, in these days of supposedly silent apps throwing up dialog boxes informing you of the fact that ‘a background task is being undertaken’ or sucking up resources like a mutha’, it is nice to use a utility, that by virtue of its being that: a utility, does its thing unobtrusively.

Furthermore, being silent and resource efficient is not the only thing that makes PerfectDisk UOTY 2010. It works powerfully. That, more than anything, is what places it here.

Funny enough, at the start of 2010, I was under the impression that the defrag race would be between the two main competitors in this field. That didn’t happen. After testing both, we have decided to go with Raxco PerfectDisk.

In fact, we are impressed enough to make it a component of the Logikworx Professional Desktop.

Yes, we are that impressed with Raxco PerfectDisk 12

When I look back at the growth of storage, on both servers and client computers, in this past year alone, and with the increasing sprawl and the attendant management headaches that virtualization brings, it goes without saying that a capable disk defrag utility is needed.

Raxco PerfectDisk is that product, and is our Utility of the Year.

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