Defrag question

[Megahurts]

I have a disc partition of 95gigs which was defraged and had 74gigs free. After copying a 4.3gig file there was 47 fragments for that file.

Why was the file fragmented? The defrag report shows there was plenty room to have a continues file.

XP Pro Sp3.

[redwudz]

What did you use to defrag it? Not all files on a HDD are moved. Some stay in the same place after defragging and the drive controller may have had to write around them. With most modern HDDs, not a big deal. Maybe a bit more important with capturing raw video, but I wouldn't worry about a bit of fragmentation. The fragmentation may also be a result of the OS stealing CPU cycles and interrupting the storage process. That's more common on boot drives, though.

PS: I used to spend a lot of time in Redding. 'Cool April Nights'. A fun town.

[TJohns]

Depend on the software, defragging a drive may only ensure files are in 1 contiguous piece (or the minimum number possible anyway). It may not guarantee the "free space" is also in a single piece, so the next file you add starts filling in all the little holes left behind!

[fritzi93]

That's really odd.

When I rip to hard drive with AnyDVDHD, it *always* fragments big time, even if the destination drive is empty. OTOH, in my experience a copy/paste of a 4-8 gig file/folder always produces a contiguous file if there's sufficient free space for it.

[TWDan]

NTFS's file write behavior in not fully clear from what I've read. Apparently it *attempts* to fit a file in the largest contiguous free space it can find, but often that does not seem to happen in reality. Maybe it starts writing from the first (from the beginning of the logical disk) extent of free space it comes across, even if there is sufficiently large contiguous space a little further 'down' the logical disk. That would explain the fragmentation behavior.

Regarding the rip to any empty destination drive...again..very strange indeed that it should fragment. Is it trying to write several 'streams' of data simultaneously to the disk? That *may* be a reason...interspersed data has fragmented? Anyway, fragmentation is not much of a problem these days..install a nice auto defragger on the system, set it to auto mode, and one doesn't have to worry about defrag any more.