Lack of speed or will it finish before lockdown ends

[ramigrafx]

Lack of speed  or will it finish before lockdown ends.

My pc has a threadripper processor and 32GB ram.

1.81TB hard drive.  460GB occupied. Very slow in copying data from it in Acronis so I decided to defrag it. It had 22% fragmentation. When it started I was surprised by the tiny indicator which said the time would be over a day. So after 2 days it suddenly showed 23hrs and then over the next 6 hours quickly dropped to a minute. It has been stuck there for about 6 hours now. I can see it doing something. The blue dots are in a long line now and the pink dots are having data read and written and the line of blue dots is getting longer. There are still 35 fragmented files out of 242 so it looks like a long wait to see if this has improved the speed of the disk.

The whole process is a farce

[nukecad]

Multi terabyte drives will take a long time to do a full disc defrag. (Which isn't normally needed on a large drive anyway).

Try doing an analyze and then 'View files', select them and 'Defrag selected' or 'Defrag checked' depending on how you have selected the fragmented files.

That will only defragment the actual files rather than looking at all the empty space on the dusc.

[Andavari]

What is the technology behind the drive, is it an SMR drive? If so they can be very slow.

Some info and links posted on here not that long ago about SMR drives:
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/58444-defraggler-worst-one-and-slowly-kills-drives/?do=findComment&comment=320468

[ramigrafx]

HI,

It is now the 3rd day and about 14 hours into remaining time :1minute. The process is still proceeding. Now only 20 files fragmented out of 242 and showing 2% fragmentation as opposed to 22% when I started. Hopefully will be completed by the morning. I cannot say what make the drive is because it is in my pc working away, but it is most likely a Seagate Barracuda (labelled as such)

[Willy2]

- Turn off System Restore. That will help to speed up the program

- Let the program move LARGE files and files you rarely use to the end of the drive.

[ramigrafx]

Hi, I don't have system restore on. It all is a new build. I backup all of my drives on a daily or weekly basis depending on the content.

Now been 4 days. Suddenly last night after staying on 1 minute to go the time jumped to 11hours 15 minutes. At the moment it has dropped to10 hours 15 minutes There are only14 fragmented files left and 1% fragmentation, so since this pc is not being used for anything in particular at the moment I will let it run. The files on this hard drive are all image files of between 450 and 700 MB so maybe that is why it is taking so much time. Fortunately it is still progressing and the number of fragmented files is decreasing

Edited August 11, 2020 by ramigrafx
added image file

[Andavari]

14 files equaling 6.1GB should only take minutes not hours, which makes me thing you might have an HDD using SMR, coupled with Defraggler being slow. If you use Win10 that might also not help you speed-wise.

I've got one of those SMR drives that I suppose does all it's shuffling about wizardry by itself which can't be reliably defragmented by any defrag tool on Win10 so I don't bother messing with it on Win10 other than copying files onto it - one of these days I'll secure erase it and then use a hammer on it. As for maintaining it I instead use an old WinXP PC to do it and if finishes a defrag ages faster even though that old dinosaur of a PC uses the unbearably slow USB 2.0 - weird but true.

[ramigrafx]

Stopped it this morning. Checked and all the images are there so now just copying to a ssd, and this hard drive is relegated to the drawer.

Thanks for your interesting advice