Problems with FAT32 file systems

[bobbyrae]

I have a Windows XP system with several drives. The NTFS drive is 36GB, 36% free space. One FAT32 drive is 18GB, also 36% free space. Another FAT32 drive is 9GB, 25% free.

 

 

Defraggler worked well on the NTFS drive. It took about 1/2 hour to completely eliminate all fragmented files. This was the quick defrag. The time estimate was in the ballpark all the way and I could see the fragments reducing in the status window. I tried a bit later, doing a full defrag where it consolidates all the free space and (supposedly) defrags directories. This took around an hour, but the drive map looked VERY orderly when done, with all the free space in one big chunk.

 

BUT...

 

When I tried it on the smaller 18 GB FAT32 drive... whoa! BIG difference. Defraggler just seems to be lost. It is reading and moving files that are already defragged. The status about the number of fragments does not change. The time estimate is in hours and changes radically as things progress. That is, actual times changes by minutes, estimate changes by HOURS. The drive was only at 3% fragmentation when I started, but after two hours it was up to 6%. Then, since the free space was still a mess with small blocks of files scattered throughout, I tried to defrag the free space. This did nothing positive. The free space was NOT consolidated and the file fragmentation went up to 10%!

 

I have tried both quick and full defrag on both these drives, but the FAT32 only seems to be a waste of time. The second time I tried it, it took about 1.5 hours and the defragmentation went from 3% to 2%, with no free space consolidation.

 

I have a third disk: it is FAT32, 9GB, 25% free space. When I started a quick defrag, it had 13% fragmentation and when Defraggler was done (about 3 minutes) the fragmentation was 11%. Again, Defraggler just seems LOST on FAT32 drives.

 

 

So I can see a big difference in how it acts on NTFS and FAT32 file systems. There probably aren't too many people out there who have both file systems, so I guess I am "lucky" that way that I can compare Defraggler on them.