The Green Stuff Moved

[Marc]

While surfing, my electricity went off for about a second. The computer
worked okay after rebooting. Then I decided to cleanup the disk and run a
defrag on my C. The big glob of unmovable files, which used to be at the
left end of the defrag screen, now appeared in three pieces at the extreme
right side, and there was a big blank space on the left where the unmovable
files used to be.

Defrag moved files into that clear space. Now I'm concerned that the heads
have to sweep the entire disk to read the unmovable files. Won't that cause
excessive thrashing and wear of the HDD? Before, the unmovable files
invariable occupied the extreme left end and were always in one piece, I
liked the looks of that.

 

[Onsokumaru]

While surfing, my electricity went off for about a second. The computer
worked okay after rebooting. Then I decided to cleanup the disk and run a
defrag on my C. The big glob of unmovable files, which used to be at the
left end of the defrag screen, now appeared in three pieces at the extreme
right side, and there was a big blank space on the left where the
unmovable files used to be.

Defrag moved files into that clear space. Now I'm concerned that the
heads have to sweep the entire disk to read the unmovable files. Won't
that cause excessive thrashing and wear of the HDD? Before, the unmovable
files invariable occupied the extreme left end and were always in one
piece, I liked the looks of that.

LOL, the "Green stuff" is usually just the page file. One large file in a
few pieces makes no difference, it's many small fragmented small files and
not enough RAM that causes thrashing.

If you are so concerned you can get Pagefile Defrag from Sysinternals. I
can't look up the URL at ther moment, but it's freeware from a reputable
source.

Though I expect you could just tell windows to delete the pagefile after the
next boot and it would have a similar effect.

You should run chkdsk just to make sure your file system is intact.

HTH.