Hi JeffS,
let's see if we can sort out what has happened here.
Firstly there is no problem using Defraggler with HDDs, people have been doing that for years.
You can also use it to Optimize SSDs, but TBH I leave that to Windows and the SSD itself.
This advice is for a HDD. (not for a SSD).
You said in your first post that Defraggler has not done what you expected, often that's a case of not understanding that there are two different types of 'Defragging'.
And yes, the stoppages during defragging may have helped make things more messy but we should be able to clear that up again.
From the time it took I'm guessing that you just clicked the 'Defrag' button after analyzing.
What happened?
As said there two processes that are both referred to as defragging - Defragmenting and Consolidation - and they do very different things.
-
Defragmenting is about getting each file in one piece, so that it can be loaded slightly quicker.
-
Consolidation is about getting all the files together in a block in the least number of clusters, so they leave more 'free clusters' on the drive.
Consolidation is what was wanted/needed in the days of smaller drives, and so it is what most people historically think of as 'defragmenting' even though it's really Consolidation.
With todays larger drives it's not needed as much, and because it can take ages on a large drive experienced users avoid doing it.
With a 1TB drive that's over 70% full a drive consolidation can take a long time, even after you had removed the 500GB of files the remaining files may still have been scattered all over that 70% of the drive so would take some time to consolidate.
To pack the files into the least number of clusters Consolidation can actually leave some files more fragmented than before, which seems to be what you are seeing here.
ie. The files have been moved into a smaller space on the drive (which I think is what you wanted) but to do that they have been fragmented more than they were before.
So what to do now to clean things up again?
By default Defragler does a mix of both Consolidation and Defragmentation - but you can tell it to do only one or the other.
With todays larger drives it's usually better just to do a 'File Defragmentation' and forget about the consolidation.
So the first thing to do now is to get your file fragmentation down by doing a 'Files only' defragment.
See this link for how to do a 'Files only' defragment without the consolidation, that will get the files into one piece each and the fragmentation percentage down, it will also be much quicker than trying to consolidate the whole drive.
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/59792-need-3rd-option-besides-quick-defrag-and-defrag/#comment-326076
Having done that do another Analyze and look at the Drive Map to see where the files are located. I think they may possibly be reasonably consolidated already.
For example this is a 500GB drive with 65GB used and 1% file fragmentation (the red bits).
It's reasonably consolidated, most of the clusters are together at the start, so I wouldn't bother consolidating it anymore.
![image.png]()
If you do still want to consolidate the drive to try and get 'all the files at the start with no gaps' (the Holy Grail of drive consolidation, it's hardly ever achieved) then do a consolidation only - <u>that will still take a long time with a 1TB drive</u>.
To do a 'Consolidation only' use Action>Advanced>Defrag Freespace. <em><u>Don't </u>use the "Allow fragmentation" option</em>, that will just fragment your files again to try and pack them in tighter.
Once you have got the files consolidated you should normally stick with just doing 'Files Only' from then on.
![image.png]()