For the past while I have been using Diskeeper 2010. I have had it set to use automatic defrag and over the past few weeks have noticed that Diskeeper sure likes to keep itself busy... Almost to the point where I realised it must be shifting my entire file structure from one end of the drive to the other.
On my C: hard drive which has my windows install (Win 7 x64), Visual Studio and steam games there is a mix of large files and small files, such as those for holding game assets and smaller files like individual .h and .cpp files of Visual Studio projects. After launching Defraggler and viewing the arrangment of my hard drive via the drive map, I noticed that a lot of the files structure had been moved to the end of my hard drive. And after reading this from Piriform's Doc's webpage "Hard drives are fastest at the beginning of the drive, and slowest at the end of the drive. That means that you'll get the best performance from your PC if your most-used files are placed at the beginning of the drive". I was shocked to see that Diskeeper, a paid for application, to be shifting large files that require performace (ie game assets) to the end of my hard drive.
Does any of the defraggler devs have anything to say on this? Is performance really better at the start of the drive, and if so do game asset files of which are compacted together like .rar files need to be placed at the end of the drive?
Here is an image of a drive managed by diskeeper:
Here is an image of a drive managed by Defraggler: