Okay, I give up....

[norel]

Does anyone know with certainty how Defraggler organizes files. I've watched and tried to figure out if there's any rhyme or reason to it but from what I can tell it mainly just compacts in the order that it finds them.

 

Anyone know anything conclusive on this?

[Nergal]

uh what?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragment

[redhawk]

I'm going to have a stab at this although Mr G is the only one to know.

 

- First Defraggler looks all the cluster allocations for every file on your hard drive.

- It creates a list of files and generates fragmentation statistics.

- In defragging mode it takes a file from the list and looks for contiguous free space to fit the size of the file.

- The Windows API is called and this moves the file or fragments to the desired location.

- The API reports back to Defraggler whether file move was successful or contains further fragments.

- The next file is processed the same way until it reaches the end of the list.

 

Richard S.

[norel]

Richard, if I understand what you're saying, under this scenario Defraggler just looks for contiguous space and fills it up, in essence compacting but not really sorting anything. Correct?

[redhawk]

I'm not sure how Defraggler decides where to moves the files but I would assume it does this with the least amount of effort, so they could be moved anywhere on the disk.

To compact the files, that is move everything to the start of the disk, you need to use the "Defrag Freespace" option under "Action, Advanced".

While compacting does a good job it would leave some gaps behind because it's almost impossible to find files to fill them completely.

To fill the gaps you have a second option called: "Defrag Freespace (allow fragmentation)" which works but at the expense of fragmenting your files.

 

Richard S.

[redhawk]

I have to be honest I'm not really impressed with the disk display Window in Defraggler I find the blocks a little large and confusing.

If you want to see how all your files are placed on the hard drive and all the gaps then Sysinterals - Disk View comes highly recommended.

 

Richard S.

[norel]

I think Defraggler is pretty good about compacting files and putting them all at the front end of the drive. This is a big improvement over the built-in Windows defragger but not as flexible as some that allow customized placement of files.

 

Custom placement isn't as critical if your drive is fairly empty. If it's fairly empty all your files wind up on the fast tracks regardless of their order. Maybe if they were arranged in a particular order you would get an increase of a millisecond or two but not enough to concern most people.

 

So Defraggler, as it is, seems like a good choice for those who don't have a lot of data but if the drive is very full I'm not sure how much good it does. "Optimization" is a good idea but from my experience those free defraggers that offer it don't work very well anyway.

[j33h4d]

hmmm...~ i don't think so... basically, those defragglers do the same thing; fix fragmentation in file system.

 

yeah~ it looks like people who hv a lot of data will trade off with time to do defragmentation. but the result can be seen much clear as those milliseconds u said will be in seconds for those files. that's why, we are adviced to defrag at least once in a week... not everyday or once in a month. this is to make sure the defrag process will become faster...

 

I think Defraggler is pretty good about compacting files and putting them all at the front end of the drive. This is a big improvement over the built-in Windows defragger but not as flexible as some that allow customized placement of files.

 

Custom placement isn't as critical if your drive is fairly empty. If it's fairly empty all your files wind up on the fast tracks regardless of their order. Maybe if they were arranged in a particular order you would get an increase of a millisecond or two but not enough to concern most people.

 

So Defraggler, as it is, seems like a good choice for those who don't have a lot of data but if the drive is very full I'm not sure how much good it does. "Optimization" is a good idea but from my experience those free defraggers that offer it don't work very well anyway.