Defragging a cloned drive

When my 7K500 gets here I'm just going to clone my current system drive. Is there any reason not to defrag the windows partition on the cloned drive before swapping it in?

 

JohnnyFlash,

I would defrag it now, why wait? It may not make the cloning go that much faster, but the drive heads will definitely be doing less dancing if its defragged.

 

It speeds up the cloning process, by not only consolidating the data, but giving the cloning software more free space to work with.

 

Theoretically this makes sense and I agree with it, but I admit that there's no evidence to quantify whether it's worth it.

 

I'm just bored so I had to come up with something to write.

 

This is a good point. What I meant was defragging the cloned drive after it's done copying. That way I'd get the page file and other things that usually can't move.

 

Ah! After its done copying...

No, I wouldn't recommend that. You want Windows to be running (there is at least one file that is protected from being de-fragged by PerfectDisk (bootstat.dat) because it can cause problems to your installation if it is moved.

Also, you will want to do an offline defrag to put those unmovable files where they perform optimally (again, I've found PerfectDisk to be the best in this regard).

 

Ah. If it's worth the time, go for it.

 

I dont know if it will do anything, defraging does just that, defragments data making the small pieces of files on the hard drive come together in one spot. It doesnt mean its filling empty spaces. When you delete a file from the drive it doesnt erase it and create an empty spot, it just marks that file and its space as no longer needed so the next time you save a file it writes over that location.

When you clone a drive its just reading 1:1 so where the data is and how scattered it is should not matter one bit.

Probably easier to make an analogy if you cant understand what I mean.

I'll use an audio CD as I think we have all burned a dvd/cd before.

When you burn a CD say it had 13 tracks it burns starting from the inner right and continues outwards. All the data burns defragmented in one continues line.

Imagine if your CD burner was on the fritz and burned the songs in 2 places every 3 seconds was on the inner ring and then the next 3 seconds burned to the outside ring of the CD.

If you were playing the song or copying just that song it would be fragmented and take longer as the laser would constantly have to move back and forth between the inner ring and outer ring.

However if you were just cloning/copying that CD the it would just read the first half of each song on the inner right moving continuously until it is done and then start on the outer ring. Its a 1:1 direct copy, it cares less what the data is or where it is, just that it duplicates it.

So it would take just as long to copy a fragmented CD as a perfect one.

 

OK, you go brother. When I first read it, reminded me of people in the inner city who spend 5K on spinner rims but the car is 5 years old and they want to borrow money for gas.

 

Actually, PerfectDisk does fill empty spaces - it moves files as close together as possible to give your disk and O/S the most contiguous free space possible.

Depends on the cloning software used - most work like how you state - some do an actual sector for sector clone so if your source disk is fragmented, then the target disk is fragmented also. Acronis does more of the former (will turn a fragmented source into an un-fragmented copy).

 

Hello everyone,
I have a faulty 5400 RPM Seagate notebook hdd (very dissapointed with seagate btw, years ago I had a faulty desktop Seagate) that gives me ntfs.sys related BSOD. It has some bad sectors since day 1 I bought the laptop. I marked them using hdtune, but pretty much the problem remains. So recently decided to get a new 7200 RPM Hitachi and intend to make a clone copy from the Seagate using Acronis.
Do you think that in the cloning process Acronis will mark the same sectors as bad to the brand new Hitachi?

 

I'm sure it won't*, but I would not trust an installation (cloned) from a known, bad disk. Do a clean install and really enjoy your new 7K500 experience.

* When you clone, Acronis will only copy partition, file and folders - it does not do a sector for sector copy as far as I know.

 

Thank you for the prompt answer.
I would not trust a cloned installation from a bad hdd either but I have spent too much time optimizing my system. Besides the ntfs.sys BSOD that appears occasionally the bad sectors impaired my system restore feature rendering it unusable. But I have to give it a shot...

 

So, you think that potentially (more than likely, I think) cloning once and installing (again) 'clean' will be more time efficient than just installing once?

I too know the time to do a fresh install and load every single app set up the way I want/need it, but I just bite the bullet and (usually) never look back for at least a few months.

Your call, but I'm

 

Mission accomplished! I cloned the old Seagate to the new Hitachi for less than 20 minutes. Acronis couldn't read the bad sectors and I ignored them. So far everything is working perfect. Before I had problems with some games like GRID, which is probably very sensitive to bad HDD sectors (although they were marked already). Experienced some freezing every 2-3 seconds, but now works like a charm. No more playing movies skipping problem. No more ntfs.sys related BSOD.

 

Well that's good news.

 

And the Gods smiled down and it was all good!

That's actually a good thing to know about Acronis - but if even one Windows driver or mission critical file resided in one of those bad clusters (and it wasn't read back correctly) you'll be getting random errors again soon.

(Which would need a clean install, of course).

I'm not trying to jinx you - just saying how lucky you are to get away with a twenty minute cloning operation. Awesome!

Cheers.