Cannot defrag my HDD any further than 12%

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sharndowg

sharndowg

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Jul 30, 2014
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hello,

After i bought a new HDD for my laptop, cloning the old one to it, then installed it into my laptop. after playing around i came across a 30% fragmented hard drive! having realised i probably hadn't defragged in a while i ran a standard windows defrag through the control panel. Which brought it down to 14%.
After playing about a little more and doing a little bit of research online i managed to get it down to 12% with AshampooWinOptimizer2014,

i have also tried chkdsk in cmd - no problem with the disk, and running multiple defrags through the command prompt- to no luck. cmd says itself it recommends defragging this drive, but it will no go any further than 12%

is there a reason this is happening? i take it there is no way to totally defrag my hdd?

i have a feeling my old hdd was pretty fragmented, and after cloning the already fragged drive into the new one its kinda made it permanent. Is this possible?

i may try defragging the old hdd and cleaning it up before re-cloning (as i still have it).

Running Win 8.1
1tb HGST HDD (new one)
500gb WD Blue HDD (old)
intel i7 3537u

Any help would be very appreciated! thanks guys!

 
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Hey, I TOLD you defraggler was cool, sharndowg!

I think there's an option to defrag the MFT at boot, too.

Also, after defragging everything else, turn off virtual memory, boot again, then delete the paging file, defrag again, then turn on VM again and reboot so your paging file is contiguous. A far better idea is to put it in a RAM drive in the high 8 megs you never use. I put my temp dir there too, and it makes everything blazingly fast.

As for placing files near the end, when you do that, they get defragged too. The feature is so you can put huge files you rarely read at the end. That way, all your "real" files will be close together and the heads won't have to move very far. Otherwise, they have to keep passing across...
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mbarnes86

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Sep 16, 2010
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Hi

Do you have a list of fragmented files
Defraggler produces one

If the page file and hybernation file are fragmented it will be difficult to defrag them as they are in use most of the time

In olden times with slower hard drives defragmentation was useful to speed up performance.

Nowdays it is useful for large data files to ease recovery of accidentally deleted files after the recycle bin is emptied

But it is vital that it is not carried out on hard drives which are dying or have bad sectors .
Laptop hard drives are at greater risk of damage as laptops are frequently moved while in use

So I would not worry about 14% defragmentation
Or even what does 14% defragmentation mean?

Regards
Mike Barnes

 
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faye__kane

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Mar 14, 2011
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==-

Mike:
> what does 14% defragmentation mean?

Don't mean SHEE-yit!

"14% fragmentation" means something, but if you don't know what, you shouldn't be answering this question.

OP:
14% is TERRIBLE! Install defraggler (find it on majorgeeks) and run an analysis. It will tell you all kinds of cool stuff including where the fragmentation is. On my sys, it was almost all 2G HD porn torrrents, so it wasn't really a big deal since I delete them after "use."

MFT and pagefile fragmentation are probably the culprits. They're massive, but they can be defragged at boot time. The MFT is almost certainly only 2 fragments, if it is fragmented at all. You need a righteous massive number of small files to overflow the default MFT, which is 12% of the drive.

As for the page file, use an 8G ram drive if you have 16G. All swap activity will go there with no latency (and yes, there still IS swap activity with 16G thanks to Microsoft's shi tty memory management.) I put the system temp dir there too, which speeds things WAY up. I also put my browser cache in the RAM disk because I don't necessarily want copies of every site I visit to be on my HDD.

And do the defrag in safe mode. Any open files (like drivers and startup apps) can't be defragged, which is certainly part of your problem.

--faye kane ♀ girl brain
sexiest astrophysicist you'll ever see naked
 
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sharndowg

sharndowg

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Jul 30, 2014
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Thanks everyone for the ideas, i have now fixed the problem! i will tell you how i did it.

Firstly i decided to get Defraggler and Auslogics defragging programs (thanks to the comments) and ran them. I ended up with Auslogics telling me i had 0% fragmented drive, and ashampoo/Defraggler/Windows still showing 12-14%.

With no difference in fragmentation i had an idea to swap out my new HDD for my old, and connecting the new one via USB/SATA while running off the old one. (thinking my new HDD wouldnt be running any of the system files or whatever and getting a more thorough defrag) Defraggler got it down to 8%, (wooo!) and after playing around with it a little more there is an option to defrag each "square" or sector individually. which i did, this further reduced the fragmentation. Also on this great software you can "move" a fragmented part to the end of the disk, and by doing this it takes all the rest of the fragmented file along with it, placing them neatly together.

The result, a zero fragmented hard drive!

(in reply to Cristi72, my C drive had 82gb free :D )

many thanks again everyone!,
 
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faye__kane

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Hey, I TOLD you defraggler was cool, sharndowg!

I think there's an option to defrag the MFT at boot, too.

Also, after defragging everything else, turn off virtual memory, boot again, then delete the paging file, defrag again, then turn on VM again and reboot so your paging file is contiguous. A far better idea is to put it in a RAM drive in the high 8 megs you never use. I put my temp dir there too, and it makes everything blazingly fast.

As for placing files near the end, when you do that, they get defragged too. The feature is so you can put huge files you rarely read at the end. That way, all your "real" files will be close together and the heads won't have to move very far. Otherwise, they have to keep passing across the large, rarely-used files when a number of small files are read.

Look at the drive map after you move them and you'll be amazed at how much rarely-touched data is at the end of the drive! In my case, 3/4 of my allocated disk space turned out to be movies.

♥,

-faye kane ♀ girl brain
 
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sharndowg

sharndowg

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Jul 30, 2014
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thanks for the info!

think i'll give moving my temp files to RAM a go. Sounds good!

:D
 
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