I have a secondary 180GB FAT32 partition where I install everything which
is not related to the Windows system, ie. mainly games and most apps.

  Reading an article about system stability and gaming performance, I got
reminded that it's a good idea to defrag disks from time to time, as a
very fragmented file system can significantly decrease performance,
especially with games which read gigabytes of data at a time from the disk.

  Last time I defragmented this partition was something like 3 years ago,
so I checked the partition. It was very heavily fragmented. From the a bit
more than 90 GB of data in the disk, about half was fragmented, and most
of this data was very heavily fragmented (large files fragmented into many
small pieces). Most prominently, the huge data files of the last few games
I had installed were very fragmented, so a significant loss in performance
was a very real possibility.

  So I ran Windows' own defrag on the partition. After almost 15 hours (!)
of work it had defragged about 30%, and the defrag program had become so
resource-heavy and unstable that I had to shut down the entire system. In
fact, the whole system had become so unstable that I was unable to shut
down the computer and had to resort to a hard reset, after finally succeeding
in closing the defrag program. Luckily this didn't cause any errors in the
partition.

  I googled for a lighter and more efficient defragmenter with good
reputation, and tried that. It was definitely more resource-light than
Windows' own defrag, and was able to defrag everything safely without
consuming increasing amounts of memory nor making the system unstable.
Even then it took it about 20 hours (!!!) to defrag everything. And this
was a program which advertised itself to be faster than Windows' own defrag.

  I can't understand why defragmentation takes such humongous amounts of
time. There were something like 40 or 50 GB worth of fragmented data,
but if you calculate how many times you can copy 50 GB inside a modern
SATA disk, I think that in 35 hours you could copy it over and over
thousands of times. (Assuming it would take 1 minute to copy 50 GB of
data, you could copy it over 2000 times in 35 hours.)

  Why does it take such a humongous amount of time? I can't understand.

  I also noticed that both defragmenters failed to use the free space
in the partition (over 80 GB) to their advantage, and instead moving
small clusters around one at a time. I'm pretty certain that if all the
free available space was used to copy data, the whole process could be
a lot faster.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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