fragmented harddrive question

Hey guys,

For some unknown reason, I went a while without defragging my drive, and it was a mess...slow, almost unusable. I downloaded auslogic disk defrag, and it worked great. The windows defragger says that my drive is fine. However, based on the analsis:



All of the free space is fragmented (I think talking about free space being fragmented makes sense). I don't have a great knowledge of this stuff, but I assume that at this point, anything that I install/download will automatically be fragmented, because of the location of the free space.

Is there a (hopefully free) program that will 'push' all of my free space to one end of the drive, resulting in a nice big continuous free space? Or is this unnecessary?

Thank you very much, and I hope this wasn't a dumb question

 

I don't really understand your question. Just defrag on a regular basis (weekly, monthly) and you'll be fine. Jkdefrag and defraggler are good free programs.

 

Let's say I want to install a 5gb program. Those 5gbs are going to be placed around the entire harddrive and is immediately going to be fragmented. I wanted to know if it was possible to, for example, move all of the used space over to the left of where it is, putting all possible free space at the end of the hardrive, so when I install a big program, it won't be fragmented.

edit: thanks for the defraggler recommendation, that seems to do what I want to do: http://docs.piriform.com/defraggler/using-defraggler/defragmenting-free-space-on-a-drive

 

Remember though that a 5GB programme is made out of smaller files that would be written into space.

Generally a normal XP defrag will move files together - JKDefrag is favoured by quite a few here on NBR - either find a GUI version or you'll need command lines though.
(I found a German GUI version - never tried it, but I speak German so it wouldn't be a problem)

 

In addition to defragmenting the data, you may also want to run PageDefrag. It looks like you're using XP, which it works with. It will defragment particular system files, which ordinary defragmenters don't handle. JkDefragGUI has this feature built in (well, it will install it automatically).

 

Great, thanks for your help guys! I'm running the freespace defragger (without fragmentation) and then I will try those programs, since I'm still at 19% fragmentation. And you're right about the big program being smaller files...I did take Operation Systems, so I should know this stuff

But based on the picture that I posted, do you agree that it would be a good idea to defrag the freespace?

 

Unless small files could "grow" - yes, it wouldn't do any harm

 

I imagine this is bad, right?

The Windows defragger agrees that the pagefile is in 968 pieces, and is 1.5 gb. Based on the (sorry) state of my HD, it makes sense to finish the freespace defragger first, because it doesn't appear that I have anything close to 1.5gb of continuous space. If the freespace defragger without fragmentation doesn't give me all that much room to work with, should I run it with fragmentation?

 

XP normal defragmenter is well-known sucks even MS admit it.
Read this post, http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=389068
Please read from 4 to 6 page.

 

Auslogics Disk Defrag is not able to consolidate free space (= defragment free space). Therefore, your defragmentation efforts using Auslogics' software weren't as helpful as they could have been, as the software runs out of free space that could be used for defragmentation all the time. You should think about switching over to another defragmentation solution completely, otherwise you will get the same problem again and again.

Here is some additional information: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_20050229/ai_mark1970970106/
According to that link, PerfectDisc seems to be a good solution. However, I have not done any further research on this, and haven't tested any of these solutions.

 

Great, thanks a lot. I'm going to finish up the freespace defragmenter, and then run that pagefile defragmenter, and see where I'm at. If I'm still having issues I'll download the free trial of perfectdisk.

 

You can also do it the "dumb" way - as I've done in the past - by repeatedly running the built-in defragmenter in XP. That will, eventually, get your files nicely compacted as well as defragmented (i.e., essentially indirectly defragmenting your free space, and I would agree with you that it makes sense to talk about defragmenting free space).

 

Is it normal for PerfectDisk to say that it is going to take over 24 hours to complete?

 

Sorry, I have not used it so I can just guess. From what I know, though, I'd say that this can very well be true as it has to shuffle around a lot of data with all those small free spaces. Maybe for every file it moves somewhere else it puts the data which is now at the target somewhere else, which again has to be put somewhere else (and so on) just to be able to finish the first operation. This would indeed need a lot of time as unfragmented free space is rare.