Moving data to beginning of Hard Drive?

[james182]

I'm wondering if there is a program that will move data to the beginning of a hard drive or partition rather. I would like to resize my C: partition to make it smaller but I don't want everything to become over fragmented. Is there a program that will just move as many files as possible to the beginning of the partition?

 

[rainypickles]

i thought defrag would do that for most of your files.

 

[james182]

As far as I know, defrag just moves files so that they are contiguous, not so that all files are in one contiguous chunk.

 

[SuperMachoMan]

What are you using to resize your partition? Partition Magic?

I thought that Partition Magic actually reformatted your drive and rewrote all your data(I assume contiguously) anyway. I could be mistaken.

 

[Davegod]

I thought any defrag will normally put files contiguous and more or less as one contiguous chunk, and norton's one (in utilities) gives a lot of options including putting specific files at the front of the drive (IIRC).

 

[corkyg]

Defrag only doesn't do much except to defrag files. What you are asking about is called "Drive Optimization> Most programs that defrag also Optimize. The place on the drive is more important to the computer than to the user.

 

[Nothinman]

The place on the drive is more important to the computer than to the user.

Generally not, the place on the drive is largely irrelevant except in a few corner cases. The only things that actually benefit from contiguous files are things like video editing programs that do very large sequential reads and writes, everything else is so random that making all the files contiguous has very little/no effect on speed.

 

[corkyg]

Generally, yes. I never said it was not random - there are specific things that must be in specific areas - like the boot sector. other than that - as long as the computer knows where to find it, the user needn't worry about it. I was not clear in my brief original statement.