Nebulous

Say I do a full defrag every month. If in between I do a couple of 'quick, 'folder' and 'free space' defrags, will the subsequent full defrag time be lessened? Or will it move the clusters that have been quick/folder defragged anyway, in an effort to optimise the drive more fully? This might be a difficult question, because you'd need to know how the algorithms differ and interact with each other.

+1 for this. I don't understand the free space is not made contiguous in the first place, as part of the normal algorithm. Surely it's just basic organisation of the disk not to have little 'islands' of isolated blocks floating in the sea of free space? As the OP suggested, a lot of people are defragging so they can shrink the drive, because they want to duel boot another OS. And where that is not the case, in the average user's mind it looks as though the program is not 'optimising' their disk as much as it could.

OK, thanks.

Usually I use the portable versions, but decided to install Ccleaner and Defraggler. What exactly is CC it looking for when 'active monitoring'? Thanks.

So that's not abnormal then. OK. Thanks.

Why does boot-time defrag only take one second? I see the black cmd line screen, but it already says 100% when it loads up. Defraggler doesn't look as if it's doing anything during a 'once' boot-time defrag. Thanks.

I just did this too, and the same thing happened. Analysis showed my D partition was 100% defragged with no files in the fragmented list. I pressed defrag again expecting it to not move anything and finish immediately. An hour later, it's still moving things around. Obviously the 'optimum layout' that the algorithm makes during analysis is not definitively optimum! I think I probably have the wrong idea about defragging though. I have two programs that my laptop struggles to run smoothly (Eg Space Engine), and one of the bottlenecks is reading from the disk fast enough. What I hoped defragging would do is put all the files pertaining to those programs right next to each other on the disk. Instead, defragging a disk seems to be more about trying to get each file wholly into one cluster (as opposed to spanning clusters), without any real attempt to optimise by collating related data. If I want all the Space Engine files all to be put contiguously/adjacently in the same area of the disk, would the 'defrag folder' option do that? I'm trying it right now, but it's taking a VERY long time - 6 fragmented files in 17 total fragments has taken over two hours, and I've still got 2 fragmented files in 5 fragments to go. Thanks.