exfat with varying cluster sizes

[johnshaft]

hi all

 

i would like some advice about what i've experienced with 2 external SATA drives.

 

both are formatted as exFAT - one with default 128k cluster size (used for my smaller docs) and the other as 1M (used for music, video, photos etc)

 

running an analysis from defraggler 2.01.239 x64 shows ZERO defragmentation from the 128k cluster drive, after a direct copy

 

however, the 1M cluster drive shows 94% after a direct copy (ran twice using debug mode also)

 

why ?

 

i can't compare this with the windows 7 x64 ultimate because it doesn't support exFAT

 

i have a debug .txt attached

 

if somebody can shed any light on exFAT and defragmentation levels on higher cluster sizes please advise.

 

thanks for any help.

Defraggler64.exe.2_1_2392011-02-27_13-46.zip

[johnshaft]

further to this:

 

i attempted to defrag the 1M cluster SATA drive (~1TB)

 

after 1 hour there was no progress

 

are there known issues with defraggler and large clustered exFAT partitions ?

[romanoff]

Hi,

 

there are no known issues concerning exFAT drives. We will check this.

 

Best regards

Romanoff

[johnshaft]

additionally, I copied data "from" the 1M cluster SATA partition to a newly formatted NTFS 64k cluster partition.

 

after defraggler analysis, there was zero fragmentation (as would be expected)

 

it seems when copying data "to" the 1M exfat partition causes virtually 100% fragmentation. Again, i have not verified this with another program.

 

Out of interest, i tried again. This time re-formatting to an exfat with a 32M cluster size. I copied about 4G of data (large files > 32M). There was zero defragmentation (again as expected)

 

The annomalies i see:

 

when analysing the 1Tb exfat formatted partition 128k cluster size (in RAID 0 config with 32k chunk size and 90% of the drive full) defraggler goes to the ?not responding? stage of a hung window, uses ~80-100% CPU resources, however it eventually completes after 15 mins. On the win 7 taskbar the green progress indicator seems to flow linearly until about 90% where it takes a lot longer to eventually finish.

 

when analysing a single 1Tb SATA drive with exfat 1M cluster size (70% full), as above

 

when analysing a single 250Gb SATA drive with exfat 128k cluster size, all is OK

 

tests/graphs/figures aside, i see no performance issues with the 1M cluster SATA drive and copying BTW any of the other drives

even though it reports as having ~85% fragmentation

 

?