Defragging a disk under WinXP

[John E]

I seem to be different from most people. Or maybe I'm just less observant. Either way, I've never noticed the slightest difference after defragging a disk drive under Windows. This really bugs me - because other people always insist they saw dramatic improvements in performance...

Anyway, having nothing to do yesterday I decided it was time to defrag some drives. I opened Control Panel (after backing everything up, naturally!!!), navigated to the Disk Defragger and ran it on my E: drive.

To my utter disappointment, it stops once it reaches the stage of having no more fragmented files. It stops - even if the free space is still severely fragmented. Consequently, as soon as I start adding new files to the disk, it immediately becomes fragmented again!!

I assumed there would be an option to put all the unfragmented files at the start of the disk leaving contiguous (unfragmented) free space at the end. But there doesn't seem to be any such option.

So can anyone recommend a good (and preferably free) 3rd party defragger?

[Arjay]

How much free space did you have before you started defragging?

[John E]

About 3GB (which was about 15 percent of the total partition size). I didn't actually lose any space though. What happened was that Windows defragged all the fragmented files by moving them into various bits of free space. After it did that I expected it to move all the (now contiguous) files near to the start of the disk, so that the free space would also be contiguous at the end. But it didn't. Having defragged the fragmented files, it just stopped - leaving 3GB of fragmented free space, spread all over the disk. Seems like a waste of effort to me....

[Arjay]

It would be interesting to see if this has changed under Vista or Win7.

[dglienna]

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