enable use of swap file for full disks

[kenny825507]

Hi

 

i wanted to defrag a usb flash drive recently and defraggler indicated i had such small space it would take forever.

 

it did and at the end i still had loads of fragmented files.

 

i know i could have moved them manually to a hard drive and rebuilt it but maybe a option could be say to allow a setting such as tempory swap file location.

 

this would enable defraggler to say selct the biggest fragmented file or more than 1 move them to a hard drive consolidate the free space and then move the files back and delete from the swap file (or leave)

 

I think this would provide a usefull feature.

 

 

ps i recently had a problem with the defraag files at boot time that if you suspended the xp laptop at boot time it said a serious problem had occured took a dump and restarted again from scratch removing the boot time defrag solved the problem.

 

 

Regards

ken

 

51 years of computing and still going

[redhawk]

Just like Solid State Drives (SSD) it's not advisable to defrag USB flash drives because of limited write cycles before becoming faulty.

Swap files are also a bad idea because you're effectively increasing defragging time by doubling the number of reads / writes (copy to swap, defrag swap).

You also increases the risk of data loss because there would be no protection against a system crash or power failure.

 

The fact is you cannot speed up the defragging process the Defragging API is inherently slow due to physical speed of the drive head / seek and the fact that file clusters are moved individual from one area of the disk to another.

Copying files on the other hand would always be faster because data is read and written in larger chunks not as individual clusters.

 

Richard S.