Problems with free space consolidation

Hello,

Recently I can't consolidate all the free space on my hard drive. I never had this problem before, so I'm wondering if it's normal. I did install a large game recently so I'm wondering if that might be causing the problem. I have tried defragging the free space and I even tried optimization with Auslogics Disk Defrag, but there is always a couple of fairly large chunks of free space between files.

I can't get it any better than what is shown in this screen shot....

http://i46.tinypic.com/10p58io.jpg

Is it normal to have free space in chunks like that? Would like to know because my drive used to defrag without those free space chunks, and I'm worried it might be a hard drive error.

Anyone?

I rarely defrag because I see no performance improvement from doing so. But whenever I defrag (for amusement) I always have large gaps afterward. It should not affect your system performance.

If you don't have a lot (hundreds) of small gaps scattered throughout the drive (that's when the positioning armature has to work) you should be ok.