Why doesn't Diskeeper move all of the files into one place on the volume?

Our primary philosophy with Diskeeper is improving and maintaining the performance of your computer.  The disk drives are the primary bottleneck in your computer's performance.  Diskeeper restores the disks to top speed by eliminating fragmentation.

It is a common misconception that a defragmented disk should look very neat and tidy in the Volume Map tab, with solid blue bars all the way across the screen (representing fragmentation-free files) and the rest white space (representing consolidated space).

Clearly, the speed of the volume (meaning how fast you can access the data on it) is more important than the prettiness of the display or the consolidation of all the free space into one place.  Free space consolidation might be important if the next file that you plan to create needs to be one gigantic contiguous file, but it has no effect on performance. I n fact, the operating system may or may not write the next file into a contiguous location—even if there is a large enough space....

Even so, you might ask why we don't continue and rearrange the files further to get a neat display?  Because it takes computer power to do so.  We long ago decided that it would be wrong for Diskeeper to consume more of your computer's performance than it gives back.  So Diskeeper defragments until the disk is in top shape performance-wise and then stops.

Now this might not be important to you if you like to sit and watch the display as Diskeeper defragments your drive, but it is a very big deal to large corporate data centers and people who depend on their computers for their work.  They need all the performance they can get and can't hold up production while the defragmenter works to enhance the “look” of the disk but not improve its performance.