Defragging freespace doesn´t seem to work !

[Dihelson Mendonca]

Hello fellows,

I´m using Defraggler to try to move the files to the beginning of a seagate 8Tb hard disk. Although Defraggler shows that the files are not fragmented, I see great portions of gap between them. These files are only video and common files, not system files nor important files. I used the option defragg freespace, but it looks like it stays at 16% forever, moving some little things or not for 4 hours and the view is basicaly the same ( It doesn´t seem to work ), so I had another idea: Copy all files to another Hard disk and bring them back. Well, when I do that, the folder is copied fine, but when I watch on defraggler, it´s not contiguous, it´s written part on the beginning of the disk and parts around the middle of the disk, and I wanted that these files could be located at the beginning of the disk because they are video files, I need speed. What could be happening ? Any suggestions ?

Thanks in advance.

[nukecad]

You are looking for the Holy Grail, and making a common mistake of confusing 'defragmentation' with 'consolidation'.

Defragmentation is intended to make each file contiguous, wherever they are located on the drive.
Consolidation is intended to get all the different files in contiguous block. (Usually at the start of the drive).

Modern defraggers will try to do the best they can for both, but you are still going to have 'holes' in the storage.
In particular you will find that the Windows 'Pagefile' is usually in a fixed position somewhere up the drive and can't be moved, it may even be split into 2 or more parts. (Which can be consolidated but not easily).

We say it's the Holy Grail because it's almost impossible to do, and even if you manage to get all your files in one block at the start of the drive that will change as soon as you start using it again, especially next time you install or update anything.

I, and others here, content ourselves with defragmenting the files and not particularly bothering about where they actually are on the drive.
As long as each file itself is contiguous then it won't (noticably) change the access speed no matter where they are on the drive.
With an 8TB drive you'll find that's much faster than defragging the whole drive.
With Defraggler run an Analyze, select 'View files', check or highlight the fragmented files, and 'Defrag Checked' or 'Defrag Highlighted'.

PS. Defragmenting freespace attemps to do the opposite and get all the freespace contiguous (but still not consolidated), to do this it usually has to fragment some files.
It will also take a long time (days?) on an 8TB drive.