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Defragging a disk by copying files

S

suszterpatt

Senior member
I need to defrag about 120GB worth of data with 70+% fragmentation. All the conventional defrag tools are either uneffective, or would take several days, possibly a week of continuous use to do the job.


So here's the idea: borrow a HD, copy all 120GB's on it, format the original drive, then copy everything back. Would this effectively defrag the data, since files are being copied one after the other, or would XP just do a block-by-block copy, thereby preserving the fragmentation?
 
Why do you care that the files are fragmented. Sounds like youll spend more time moving the data then the total reduced seek time you'd hit in a year.

File copy would not be block by block..

Why doesnt the default defragger work for you?

 
Originally posted by: bsobel
Why do you care that the files are fragmented. Sounds like youll spend more time moving the data then the total reduced seek time you'd hit in a year.

File copy would not be block by block..

Why doesnt the default defragger work for you?
Click to expand...
It's part of a larger project. Currently I have a 200GB drive partitioned in two, 10GB for WinXP and the rest (around 175GB) for everything else. I'll be moving to Vista in a couple days, and I need to expand the OS partition and shrink the other one. However, I understand that even with tools such as GParted that are designed to change partition sizes without losing data, files can get lost/corrupted if they are too fragmented. And some of my files are hideously, retardedly fragmented: some have a fragment count in the 10,000s! The default defragger just points at these files and says "can't defrag these, sorry!". I tried O&O defrag and Defraggler, and while they do go over everything, they're way too slow: the above described copying technique would be much faster than waiting for one of these apps to finish.
 
Tried it, it also refuses to defrag the nastier files. Which is why I'm looking for an alternate solution such as the one described above.
 
Anyhow to answer your question, yes that would effectively defrag the disk.
 
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Anyhow to answer your question, yes that would effectively defrag the disk.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how. The order in which they are selected is the order in which they will be copied back to the HDD.

Yes, files installed in the same directory will be next to each other on the platter, but you could end up having something useless on the inner part of the platter and a program you use a lot on the outer part of the platter.

I don't know where you got the days long estimate but that cannot possibly be right. Set it to defrag right before you go to bed and it will be done by the time you get up. The Windows de-fragmentation utility is actually very good (Since they received a slimmed down version of diskeeper starting with XP).

As for the files that it claims are immovable-- they are probably OS/System specific files. Disable your Virtual Memory and start up. You can also download the trial version of diskeeper and run a boot time defrag which will take care of those files.

-Kevin
 
Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Anyhow to answer your question, yes that would effectively defrag the disk.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how. The order in which they are selected is the order in which they will be copied back to the HDD.

Yes, files installed in the same directory will be next to each other on the platter, but you could end up having something useless on the inner part of the platter and a program you use a lot on the outer part of the platter.
Click to expand...
That would already be a great improvement, see below why.

I don't know where you got the days long estimate but that cannot possibly be right. Set it to defrag right before you go to bed and it will be done by the time you get up. The Windows de-fragmentation utility is actually very good (Since they received a slimmed down version of diskeeper starting with XP).
Click to expand...
This is the partition in question:
http://xs229.xs.to/xs229/08272/defrag285.jpg

The half-row of progress you see there is the result of at least 6 hours of defragging while the computer was left alone. There are about 31.5 rows in total, and it's charitable to say that 6 of them are NOT fragmented. 25.5*6 hours = 153 hours = 6.375 days at the very least.

As for the files that it claims are immovable-- they are probably OS/System specific files. Disable your Virtual Memory and start up. You can also download the trial version of diskeeper and run a boot time defrag which will take care of those files.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

The partition doesn't have any system files at all (save for the main pagefile). The files some of the tools refuse to defrag are large (500MB-5GB) files, mainly movies and DVD images, with fragment counts in the 10,000s (the most fragmented file has no less than 88,000 fragments!). There are dozens of them too, I don't recall their exact size, but they're at least 50GB total.
 
Originally posted by: suszterpatt
Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Anyhow to answer your question, yes that would effectively defrag the disk.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how. The order in which they are selected is the order in which they will be copied back to the HDD.

Yes, files installed in the same directory will be next to each other on the platter, but you could end up having something useless on the inner part of the platter and a program you use a lot on the outer part of the platter.
Click to expand...
That would already be a great improvement, see below why.

I don't know where you got the days long estimate but that cannot possibly be right. Set it to defrag right before you go to bed and it will be done by the time you get up. The Windows de-fragmentation utility is actually very good (Since they received a slimmed down version of diskeeper starting with XP).
Click to expand...
This is the partition in question:
http://xs229.xs.to/xs229/08272/defrag285.jpg

The half-row of progress you see there is the result of at least 6 hours of defragging while the computer was left alone. There are about 31.5 rows in total, and it's charitable to say that 6 of them are NOT fragmented. 25.5*6 hours = 153 hours = 6.375 days at the very least.

As for the files that it claims are immovable-- they are probably OS/System specific files. Disable your Virtual Memory and start up. You can also download the trial version of diskeeper and run a boot time defrag which will take care of those files.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

The partition doesn't have any system files at all (save for the main pagefile). The files some of the tools refuse to defrag are large (500MB-5GB) files, mainly movies and DVD images, with fragment counts in the 10,000s (the most fragmented file has no less than 88,000 fragments!). There are dozens of them too, I don't recall their exact size, but they're at least 50GB total.
Click to expand...

That is pretty fragmented haha. Copying/Moving and what not will take a long time as well though in my mind since the files are so fragmented. The head is going to flying all around the platter trying to grab each piece. 6 days is a long time, so you might as well try the copy -> format -> copy, but I just don't see it helping too much (I would love to be proved wrong in this case though 🙂 ).

If you buy diskeeper pro or something similar it should deal with larger files-- 5GB isn't that large that it should be having trouble in my mind though (Though, admittedly, I don't know the typical max used by defrag tools).
 
Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Anyhow to answer your question, yes that would effectively defrag the disk.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how. The order in which they are selected is the order in which they will be copied back to the HDD.
Click to expand...
Order really has nothing to do with it. Fragmentation is the result of large files being added to a drive which has no contiguous block of free space large enough for said file, due to the effectively random creation of free space through file deletion. When he starts copying files back in after a reformatting, it's just going to start filling the disk from the inside/outside (I forget which) of the disk always leaving the rest of the free space as one whole block. It gets a bit more complicated than that with NTFS, but the basic theory doesn't change.

We really aren't concerned where something ends up on the disk, the goal is to make sure it ends up together.
 
Nah, the drive's fine.


Happy end btw, all I had available was an old 60GB IDE drive to do the manuever, so I had to burn about 70GB of stuff to dvd's (mostly the heavily fragmented files), but at that point O&O's speed increased enough that defragging the drive only took half a day, so I didn't even have to use the extra HD at all. 🙂
 
The easiest way to fight heavy fragmentation is to ensure that there's adequate free space on the hard drive to begin with. If you MUST have a separate OS partition (I seldom, if ever, do that nowadays, since it causes more problems than it solves), be sure to leave it "plenty" big. Also, effective (read "fast") defragmentation requires a significant of free space on the drive.
 
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