Jump to content

Excessive / high Fragmentation when copying files . XP


JoeGons

Recommended Posts

Hi,

I copied one external drive to another new external

USB 2.0, NTFS XP SP3

It took over 12 hours!!! 298GB of data with some very large files.

When I was finished the drive was 40% fragmented. ..

One 3.6GB file had over 1200 fragments.

I tried to de-fragment it with Auslogics and really messed it up.

The drive became unreadable and check disk “aborted” trying to fix it.

I did it over and got the same fragmentation.

Checkdisk found no problems before de-fragmenting.

I am reluctant to try and de-fragment it now.

Is this normal?

Will Windows 8 do this?

Joe

Link to comment
Share on other sites


The actual EXACT method you used to copy the files may be involved in the fragmentation level in the target.

More than that, the effectiveness of defragmenting a drive may be affected by how much it is "full".

jaclaz

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is very possible that the Explorer copy/paste is not sequential or not strictly sequential (like multithreading or something like that), which may cause higher fragmentation in the target.

In any case with that such large amount of free space defragmentation should not be a problem. :unsure:

Can you try running on that single 1200 extents file Wincontig (and report what happens)?:

http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/

jaclaz

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Make sure drive caching is enabled (optimized for better performance, not for quick removal, can't remember where that is in XP), it should go faster than those 7M/s.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Make sure drive caching is enabled (optimized for better performance, not for quick removal, can't remember where that is in XP), it should go faster than those 7M/s.

That's a good point.

That is exactly how I have my externals setup.

I'll try it again with disk caching.

Thanks

Joe

And for the Finder;

I have downloaded Wincontig and will have a look.

Auslogics does allow single file defrag.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Unfortunately Windows XP by default has no mechanism to prevent file fragmentation when copying files. So if you move a lot of files most of them will become fragmented. You can defrag your drives often as a workaround for this problem.

To prevent fragmentation there is AFAIK only one software solution on the market, called OptiWrite which is part of recent PerfectDisk versions. If you select this option in PerfectDisk it activates a file system filter driver which controls file placement when files are being copied. This does come with a cost. When this OptiWrite feature was first introduced in PerfectDisk 12 it was affecting system performance negatively. I recently tested PerfectDisk 13 performance. The general defragging speed of PerfectDisk 13 is still very slow, but the OptiWrite feature has improved. It is not perfect at preventing fragments, but it has some effect.

Edited by Acheron
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This report is suprising. I wonder if it occurs only on USB drives, or maybe on multi-core CPUs. Not long ago I did defragment my FAT32 "applications" partition connected via SATA by moving files out of it and back in, and got the expected result: got rid of unmovable directory entries and general fragmentation. I used Mini-XP to move the files out and Total Commander (in it's own buffered copy mode) to move the files back in. I haven't noticed slow performance when doing copying in Explorer either.

The slow speed and any seeking noise might be an indication that the process is multi threaded for some reason, when it shouldn't be.

I would follow Bphlpt's advice and use other programs to see if they make a difference.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Deactivating the antivirus might improve speed as well. All in all, 24Gig an hour is not that bad anyway. It might also depend on the type of data (small files vs. big files).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...