[Questions] Usability of Diskeeper's "IntelliWrite" Filter Driver

Diskeeper’s Intelliwrite seems to be nothing more than a filter driver?
A .sys file that can be added to Device Manager using the ‘Have Disk’ method.

Question is:
Do filter drivers rely on other files to work correctly?
Or can one simply experiment with the .sys file, DKRtWrt.sys downloadable from here:
https://www.exefiles.com/en/sys/dkrtwrt-sys/

Or are other supporting drivers and files required??


WHY YOU’D CARE:
Diskeeper is who Microsoft turns to for disk maintenance software:
The Windows Defrag app is from them.
The full version does a lot of stuff to 1st avoid drive fragmentation and also defragment them.

One of the most interesting to me is the intelliwrite function that avoids file fragmentation on initial write and (read/write caching, defrag, etc is available elsewhere) reads:

Picture the disk map, in your fave defrag app, of a fragmented drive.
Remember al those little free space gaps…
When windows writes a file to file to the drive it tends to split the file of into small pieces to fill those gaps.
That’s not good!:

For SSD and HDD it means that the initial write and all subsequent reads, that could have been large large sequential I/O is turned into small random (4K) I/O
We all know how much worse random I/O performance is on both SSD and HDD.

On SSDs it also means that a more than necessary number of Erase Blocks have to be read, modified, written. A process that wears out Flash memory.

Info on Intelliwrite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condusiv_Technologies
https://condusiv.com/intelliwrite-behind…ht=IntelliWrite
https://condusiv.com/crazy-or-smart-insi…ht=IntelliWrite
https://condusiv.com/best-practices-for-…-server-2008r2/

https://condusiv.com/?s=IntelliWrite
https://legacy.condusiv.com/defrag/intelliwrite/default.aspx
http://downloads.condusiv.com/pdf/Inside…ntelliWrite.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11036-019-01441-1

EDIT by Fernando: Thread title shortened

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I still use Diskeeper’s feature until now on Windows 10 and still doing wonders for me for over 3 years it is a must for any storage devices no matter what to be honest.

2024… still using it on Win11 24H2 :slight_smile: I even managed to make it compatible with DirectStorage :wink:

Are you using the full version of Diskeeper, or just the filter driver DKRtWrt.sys TheBoss?
If just the filter driver; are there any other supporting files reqd?
And DirectStorage??

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Only install DKRtWrt, DKTLFSMF, CTFLTMGR, tcefs drivers

If you want to have IntelliMemory feature you can install vintmfs but you won’t have any control on how much it uses your RAM… it needs tced driver. If you install tced driver you won’'t have DirectStorage compatibility

All while keeping DirectStorage compatible :wink: