(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> I was recently trying to defragment my hard drive (tried using Norton
> Speed Disk as well as the Windows XP defrag program). My hard drive is
> 35% fragmented. I also have about 6GB Free space (out of 15GB C
I
> have run both programs but it will not allow me to be any less than 35%
> fragmented. How do I defragment my drive so it is 0% fragmented? Do I
> need to use another program? Delete something? Thanks.
Depending on how big the file is, some files can't really be
defragmented down to 1 part very easily on NTFS, unlike in FAT. Last
time I looked into these things, NTFS (and its predecessor, HPFS on
OS/2) was organized into fixed-size regions on the disk. If a specific
file was bigger than the size of a region, then that file would be
spread over multiple regions. About the only way to make those huge
files 1 contiguous file would be put them on adjacent regions. Each of
the regions are huge, several megabytes. I think most defrag programs
don't bother to make files contiguous between regions, they are happy to
simply make them contiguous within a region.
But it's not necessary to worry about getting defragmented to so much of
an extent. The whole idea of defragmenting is to reduce latency by
reducing physical head movements on the disk. When you got files big
enough to occupy multiple regions, then you're way beyond worrying about
disk latency, and you have to worry about disk bandwidth.
Yousuf Khan