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Drive Defragged But Light Blue Boxes Everywhere


luckyarthur

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Greetings,

 

I just defragged my drive and the analysis says that there are 0 Fragmented Files and 0 Total Fragments. But there are light blue boxes all over the place following the nice neat rows of dark blue boxes. When I hover the mouse over these boxes the little popup says "No files are in the block." So, if there are no files in the blocks why are all those light blue boxes appearing all over the screen?

 

Thanks for any help on this.

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  • 1 year later...

I get the exact same thing on multiple computers, and I am using Defraggler v2.0. No matter what I try I cannot seem to get it to defragment those sections. Can anyone explain this?

 

Shaggie

 

Greetings,

 

I just defragged my drive and the analysis says that there are 0 Fragmented Files and 0 Total Fragments. But there are light blue boxes all over the place following the nice neat rows of dark blue boxes. When I hover the mouse over these boxes the little popup says "No files are in the block." So, if there are no files in the blocks why are all those light blue boxes appearing all over the screen?

 

Thanks for any help on this.

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Not files and not fragmented (blue not red), think I discovered such were folders, that weren't compacted to front of drive. With time and defragging the freespace, some of the filesystems speckled by such have gradually had the white blocks gradually become less and less speckled. Had that with V1 defraggler, and only just switching to V2.

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Same here.... Using version 2.00.230. I have only noticed it on Windows XP machines but several of them.

 

It's really annoying because anytime a large file is created, OS fragments the file around those light blue boxes. I tried variety of methods to clear them out. Chkdsk /R & /F. Windows built in defrag tool. Other defrag tools. Defraggler boot-time defrag. Fsutil. Etc.

 

Someone please.... At least tell us what they might be.

 

Thanx

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It's really annoying because anytime a large file is created, OS fragments the file around those light blue boxes. I tried variety of methods to clear them out. Chkdsk /R & /F. Windows built in defrag tool. Other defrag tools. Defraggler boot-time defrag. Fsutil. Etc.

 

I agree it's annoying, but you should use some common sense on this. For example, I have a file system that would be "perfectly" layed out, if only 2 big files weren't fragmented. One is an 150 MB ISO file, the other a 250 MB avi video file. The ISO is in 4 pieces, the video in 2. Now whilst it is irritating to have 3% fragmentation shown, with 342 MB of fragmentation, 2 files, 6 pieces; the reality is these fragments do not have a significant performance impact.

 

We defragment filesystems, to avoid the performance penality of highly fragmented files ie small files requiring vast number of disk seeks to read them in, not to avoid huge files being saved in small number of chunks. Striving for perfection, we hit diminishing returns where the costs of perfect defragmentation, out weigh massively, the benefits of faster reads.

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  • 1 month later...

the reality is these fragments do not have a significant performance impact.

 

I understand your point, Rob, your point is correct and totally valid. I think all of us here know that a few (even several), large file fragments are totally acceptable (even though they're a bit of an eyesore).

But what Okan and myself want to know is:

 

FYI I'm gonna call these blue blocks with no files "ghost blocks". They mess with your files, but when you turn on the lights... nothing's there. Spooky. Annoying. Intangible. That's a ghost.

 

What ARE these empty blue boxes, and why are we having these problems? Why can't we get rid of them? Is Piriform working on this problem? (I would think that they are, they seem to be real good people) And when can we expect a fix?

 

I'm very interested in these answers because I've recently discovered that my \C drive has over one hundred and twenty five of these annoying little blocks. I know that at this point these ghost blocks are definitely not impacting my laptop's performance, yet. However, I'm certain that there are many other people out there experiencing the same problem that we are. Most probably don't have enough of these pesky blocks to affect performance, but some may have so many ghost blocks that the performance of their drive's are being impaired.

My eleven gigabyte Batman: The Dark Knight digital copy would probably be in at least forty fragments, if I were to move it onto my \C drive (which I won't). Now, that isn't enough fragments to ruin an eleven gig movie, it might only cause a short pause every ten minutes or so. But I want answers for the few people whose drives have so many ghost blocks that they are having problems.

 

Any new information would be greatly appreciated. The considerate response of a Piriform rep. would be amazing!

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My eleven gigabyte Batman: The Dark Knight digital copy would probably be in at least forty fragments, if I were to move it onto my \C drive (which I won't). Now, that isn't enough fragments to ruin an eleven gig movie, it might only cause a short pause every ten minutes or so.

Buffering (requesting disk blocks before they're required) avoids such pauses due to changing fragments, if you skip frames the cause is some other latency inducing factor, a rough calculation shows a 2 hour 11GB file requires disk transfer rate of only 3 MB/s. Even my 10 yr old UDMA33 drives handle that with ease.

 

To find out what the light blues boxes contain, choose "Analyse" then on coloured map click on light blue box, and look in the "Highlighted" Tab, which tells you the file names. Doing that I see for instance one of my light blues contain $MFT & $Bitmap which are NTFS internals used for bookkeeping.

 

If you list the files which are not compacted (or defragged) then it'll be clearer what's happened.

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I've just managed to get rid of a "light blue box" (caused by a Folder in a FAT filesystem in an incovenient spot at end of disk where large files are moved to), by renaming the folder, creating a replacement, moving the file in, and deleting the original and emptying recycle bin.

 

The highlight view, has an open containing folder option, so it was quite quick to do. Because small files have many varying sizes the defrag can pack around immoveables without showing fragmentation in most cases, at the beginning of the disk. That's the reason they show up in free area and at end of disk, but not in the densely compacted parts containing small files.

 

Now I suspect where you have many of these it is likely a result of having full (or highly fragmented) disk at some point in past, for stubborn system files, you may even need to back up files, re-format the partition and recopy back at the file level, alot of trouble for small benefit.

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Hi,

 

these light blue boxes you see with no files inside are used by NTFS internals. There are many different filesystem structures that occupy space on the drive but are completly out of reach for Defraggler - NTFS just does not allow to move or even open them (even in the boot-time defrag). They are not added to the analysis results simply because one cannot do anything with them. Their names are also very confusing for users which are not IT professionals.

 

As to folders on FAT drives - they also cannot be moved. The filesystem driver does not allow moving first cluster of the directories.

 

Best regards

Romanoff

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