Jump to content

Defraggler crashes with NTFS clusters over 64KB


Recommended Posts

When analysing any NTFS drive formatted with cluster sizes of 128KB or larger defraggler either crashes or the analysis gets stuck on starting.

Other file systems with large clusters of 128K such as ExFAT do work as expected.

I know its unusual to have clusters this large but I need them for a particular backup program that when creating huge backup files has a tendency to have massive fragmentation issues and huge clusters greatly reduces this problem.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

This seems to indicate that not much supports clusters over 64k, at the time it was written. It seems a pretty serious change.

https://dfir.ru/2019/04/23/ntfs-large-clusters/

And the About Defraggler page states that defragging NTFS clusters greater than 64k isn't supported.

https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048065892-What-Defraggler-can-and-can-t-do

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So why isn't there any support? Older defrag programs from years ago such as UltraDefrag do appear to support such drives years ago (I have not extensively tested this but it appeared to work fine) and programmatically I would of thought it would be relatively simple to implement. 

Atleast if for some strange reason you chose not to support such drives the program should fail gracefully and bring up a prompt informing the user that it can't defrag such drives instead of just falling over or hanging?

Edited by Prototype
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

Someone had similar issues last year with using over 64KB cluster size, as seen here:
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/59162-defraggler-crashes-when-analyzing-drive-with-128k-cluster-size/

Just because one defrag tool was updated to support it doesn't mean the myriad of others will or ever will, can't assume that. Allot of defrag tools are at this point very legacy and much older than when Microsoft added support for a cluster size larger than 64KB. I guess that kind of makes it obvious that although defrag tools are calling the Microsoft Defrag API they're still doing their own thing, and I think a crash is better than it trying to defrag the disk and corrupting it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.