In fact, we gave that award to the entire PerfectDisk suite of products.
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.
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.
We like it, and as a result, we have it on our radar for 2011.
We had the opportunity to interview Bob Nolan, president of Raxco Software via email.
SmallBizWindows: What makes Raxco the company to beat in this space?
Bob Nolan: Raxco Software is a privately-held company that has been providing end users, SMBs and 
SmallBizWindows: In defragmentation, you have an excellent reputation and great top-of-mind awareness among both IT professionals and end-users. As the market moves further into multi-terabyte drives, and both DAS and NAS devices, do you expect to maintain that lead?
Bob Nolan: We do. Raxco continues to innovate in order to maintain its leadership role. We were the first to recognize the importance of consolidated free space, the first to defragment multi-terabyte drives, one of the first applications to fully integrate with Active Directory and the first to offer a product for a virtualized platform. Those are just a few of our “firsts.” As technology evolves into virtualization and the cloud, we see new opportunities emerging in the areas of performance, space utilization and management of storage resources.
SmallBizWindows: How are you preparing your offerings for SSDs?
Bob Nolan: We support SSDs now. File fragmentation is not an issue with SSDs; however, due to the way data is written to SSDs free space fragmentation can degrade write performance and consolidated free space improves SSD write performance. The trick is to provide the largest possible chunk of contiguous free space while minimizing any file movement. Raxco will soon offer an improved SSD optimization method that consolidates free space but doesn’t defrag any files. The free space is organized around the largest existing piece of free space, wherever that resides on the disk. The net result is a reduction in write activity to the disk which prolongs its lifetime use.
Thanks to Bob for taking the time, and to Joe Abusamra at Raxco helping with making this happen and for being an all-round nice guy, despite being a Boston Celtics fan!
