Asagrim

Used to be far less. I have a second 3TB drive I use as a manual backup for the first, and I just can't leave 272 GB free in case I want to defragment it, it's a waste of space. I'd sooner buy a 1TB drive and call this whole thing off. Buying a hard drive of any size the first place I'm being scammed out of 10% storage space first because manufacturers work with decimal numbers and a second 10% because I need that space to defragment. I say thanks but no thanks to that. Besides, why would this process need a fixed percentage the first place? Why would it need the same percentage of free space on a 160GB drive than a 10TB drive if they are formatted with the same file system to the same cluster size and both having 2-4 GB files on them? I can't see why 10% is the magic number. I have twice as much free space than my largest file, that means the defragmenting process has enough free space to work with to move any one of my files around in a single segment if it wanted to. How can a software be so ineffective at playing Tower of Hanoi?!

A compressed video file takes a split second longer to open, but it practically makes no difference when it's already playing. NTFS compression is not making file operations on any modern computer any slower, it takes a bit more CPU performance to copy/move files, but that's it. I've been using NTFS compression by default practically for 17 years without ill effect. I've also been using Defraggler since about 2010 but it has never been this slow.

I know for a fact that my media player behaves the way it does because the files are too fragmented. When I copy a problematic video file over to a different drive, the problem goes completely away, but doing that for every single video file before opening them would defeat the whole purpose, since it wouldn't be any faster than just viewing them fragmented as they are, and patiently waiting for my media player to jump to the selected section when I click on the seek bar. Like I mentioned in my initial post, Defraggler doesn't use much CPU at all for me, it spikes at 29%, while averages at 22% so with other programs factored in, I basically have a 50-70 percentile idle performance it could use, but doesn't. I have the impression it could go faster if it would use all resources properly i.e. as much as available, but it doesn't, it just smoothly idles away while performing very slowly. I kind of hoped for a developer response on this one, since I am convinced that this is completely abnormal behavior. In nearly 3 decades of using a computer I never had a software that didn't use all the available performance it needed to perform a resource intensive task in order to finish as fast as possible.

I need to defragment the large files too. Like I mentioned before, they are video files for my youtube channel, and they are so fragmented I can not use the seek bar without my media player momentarily freezing, and that makes my job - trying to find suitable clips for a mashup - practically impossible. And yes, it would take two months. If I wouldn't turn off my computer at all, and if Defraggler wouldn't freeze, it would take 50 days to finish, but I need to restart my computer, I need to turn it off for maintenance, I can have a power outage... any number of scenarios where I would have to start from the beginning and Defraggler would take time until it catches up to where it left off. So I was fairly optimistic with two months. I need to make Defraggler faster, not use a different method for defragmenting.

When I try to do a Quick Defrag with custom rules as suggested, Defraggler just skips over the entire partition in about 4 minutes and calls it done. The only way I'm gonna defragment files to an acceptable level is by doing a full defrag, and I'm looking for options to make it finish faster than two months.

I want to defragment the entire partition, I do not have a file preference. The entire drive consists of large files, it contains all the raw footage for my youtube channel, so I can't move them to another partition and back again to get rid of fragmentation that way. I do not have any free space whatsoever on my other partitions (double digit megabytes). The free space on the partition I am defragmenting is 11.7GB, my largest file is 4.8GB. Eventually I want to consolidate the free space too, so when I have system files and temp storage back their fragmentation won't hog performance, but right now, that seems like something I won't be able to do until early summer. I wish I was exaggerating...

Hi there! I have a 660GB partition on a 3TB non-system drive I've been using NTFS compression on when it was almost full, then filled it even more as more free space became available. I never defragmented this drive before, move files quite frequently from/to it, and had it for 3 years, so I ended up with 86% fragmentation and about 1.43 million file fragments (mostly due to the NTFS compression I bet). Even so, with Defraggler barely utilizing any system resources, I don't think 7% in 3 days is normal behavior. I don't pretend to know how Defraggler is supposed to work under the hood, but I find it odd that it doesn't fully utilize available system resources. It barely has any I/O load on the drive it's defragmenting and utilizes only 1/4th of the idle CPU performance with plenty of free RAM left. The free space is not the recommended 10%, but is still more than twice the size of my largest file on the partition. No other processes are running that would actively use any of the drive's partitions. No paging, hibernation, system restore, or any other system file or temporary cache is currently allocated to this drive, for the time being I made it completely idle for Defraggler to use. Is there something I missed that would increase the speed of the defragmenting process on this drive? Thanks!