Does % of fragmentation apply to my entire disk or just my files?

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pnartg

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I mostly use my C: drive for program files, not data. I keep my data on external drives or my NAS.
Most of my programs are Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office and so I have subscriptions and they get updated frequently. (so does the OS) I've noticed that over time performance has been going down and down and seems to be disk-bound with my C: drive getting longer queues and spending lots of time in 100% Highest Active Time.

Someone suggested that with all these updates, maybe my program files and OS files are getting fragmented. But my disk analysis only shows 15% fragmentation.

But then I had a thought - most of my disk is empty. So that's not fragmented at all. Could that skew the percentages? If you have a mostly empty disk but the files that are on the disk are badly fragmented would that still show up as a low percentage? In other words when they say "15%" fragmentation do they mean 15% of my FILES or 15% of my DISK?
 
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USAFRet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation

"File fragmentation
Individual file fragmentation occurs when a single file has been broken into multiple pieces (called extents on extent-based file systems). While disk file systems attempt to keep individual files contiguous, this is not often possible without significant performance penalties. File system check and defragmentation tools typically only account for file fragmentation in their "fragmentation percentage" statistic."

It depends on what tool is telling you this, but that generally refers to fragmentation of the files. Not the whole drive.

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pnartg

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RGD1101 seems to disagree with you.


How will that answer the question? FWIW I just now did a defrag and performance is noticably better at 0% than 15%.


 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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They said the same thing, but in a different way. Files use the space on the disk.

Running defrag is the simplest solution to what you were experiencing, no good reason not to run it unless you fear hardware failure.
 
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pnartg

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No they didn't say the same thing. Imagine a disk that's 50% full but that the files that are in that 50% are 100% fragmented ( = no two sectors in the same file are adjacent, so the disk head has to do a separate seek to access every sector in a given file). If the percent fragmentation refers to the FILES then the analysis would say 100%, but if it referred to the disk then it would say 50%.

WHY IT MATTERS: because it helps interpret the analysis report. If it's the whole disk then a low percentage of fragmentation on a mostly empty disk would still indicate a high degree of fragmentation and a need to defragment.

If your disk is 10% full and the analysis said 9% fragmentation then that's a big deal, but your disk is 70% full and the report said 9% fragmentation then it's not a big deal - - - iff the % refers to the whole disk.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation

"File fragmentation
Individual file fragmentation occurs when a single file has been broken into multiple pieces (called extents on extent-based file systems). While disk file systems attempt to keep individual files contiguous, this is not often possible without significant performance penalties. File system check and defragmentation tools typically only account for file fragmentation in their "fragmentation percentage" statistic."

It depends on what tool is telling you this, but that generally refers to fragmentation of the files. Not the whole drive.

 
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pnartg

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Thank you. The tool is the built-in Windows 7 defragmenter.

 
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Martell1977

Martell1977

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Wow, you need some reading comprehension, here is my original comment:

"The 15% is the fragmented amount of the space used on the disk."

I never said the whole disk, just the used portion, as in the space the files are using. So if the defrag tool says 15% fragmented, then the files using the space on the drive are 15% fragmented.
 
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Lekro44

Lekro44

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In addition to that there is free space fragmentation also. That means your free space is broken up and is not sequential. That also could lower the performance. There are tools which can defrag free space too, not sure about the windows 7 built in one, windows 10 does it automatically. Another software is defraggler or auslogics defrag which can do free space optimization.
 
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