Condusiv Technologies has released Diskeeper 12, the latest edition of its powerful and professional defrag tool.

Improvements this time include an optimised HyperBoot engine, which aims to further improve your system boot times.

Diskeeper’s HyperFast technology now supports TRIM to maximise Solid State Drive performance.

A handy set of monitoring tools collect data on your I/O usage and Diskeeper effectiveness, and track your drive’s key SMART attributes, enabling the program to alert you to possible signs of impending hardware failure.

It may take some time to get used to Diskeeper's new interface

And, perhaps more controversially, all of this is presented in a completely revamped interface. We don’t just mean the usual tweaks you might expect in any upgrade (a new background colour here, a different toolbar there): this is radically different. The Home screen has no list of volumes, for instance, no substantial details on your system state – it barely looks like a defrag tool at all.

As soon as you start to drill down into the various sections then this all changes, fortunately, and Diskeeper delivers all the stats and feedback you’d expect (and then a little more, thanks to the new monitoring tools). And once you understand how the new interface works then it seems straightforward enough. It does represent a major change, though, and we suspect not all Diskeeper users will be happy with the new approach.

If you’d like to take a look for yourself, though, the standard edition of the program comes in two flavours.

Diskeeper 12 Home ($29.95) is the core build, which provides everything we’ve listed here.

And Diskeeper 12 Professional ($64.95) extends this with free space consolidation, file access speed improvements of up to 80%, and a core engine specifically designed to cater for massive file fragmentation on hard drives in excess of 1TB.