Hard drive fragmentation

[Mandevu]

I have XP Pro SP2, 1Meg DDR RAM with two hard drives, C & D. I keep my operating system & programs on C drive & files on D. Recently I moved my page file from C to D having read this may improve performance. Noticed small improvement, but now C drive is becoming fragmented more quickly than it did before. Is this to be expected & is there a fix?

[Zxian]

Moving the pagefile to a separate hard drive shouldn't lead to more fragmentation on the system drive.

Could it be that you or your programs have been writing more to C Drive since you moved your pagefile?

The percentage of fragmentation will be more noticable if you've moved the pagefile, since the pagefile ususally doesn't become fragmented that easily and takes up a lot of space. Moving it away would remove that non-fragmented section of your drive, thus increasing the percentage of fragmented files/space listed.

Unless it's an excessive amount of fragmentation, I wouldn't worry about it.

[garnet]

You could use one of the automatic third party defrag tools which will check the frag levels on a daily basis but will defrag only when needed. They do so in the background so you wont have to check it manually everytime.

[jaclaz]

Freeware ones:

http://www.dirms.com/

Buzzsaw and Dirms = you don't need diskeeper

jaclaz