Patrick Elliott schrieb:

> Still, point is, if you have memory free, open or not, I see no reason 
> why, if you have free real memory, you couldn't page in some of the file 
> that isn't "in use", page it back out someplace saner, etc. and defrag 
> it that way. Ironically, its one thing I almost miss from the old 
> Win3.11 days, where you could use Norton's defragger to defrag 
> everything "including" the page file, and shift files you use a lot 
> closer to the start, and unscatter directories, *and* consolidate free 
> space.

Remember how, /theoretically/, you were supposed to actually /pay/ for 
Norton Utilities back in those days?

Well, here may be news for you: There's still defraggers around for 
sale, and which are said to perform better than the defragger MS is 
giving away for free with their OS. ;-)

 > I get that Windows defrag now does most of those, but it does
> them damned inefficiently, and no matter how many times you "force" it 
> to consolidate files, it will flat out *refuse* to consolidate the free 
> space, even when there is no sane reason to leave a handful of files 
> scattered willy nilly over the remaining disk space.

Question is, what is the most efficient distribution of empty space 
after a defrag? One huge consecutive chunk?

Actually, that's rarely the case. This is only good for drives 
containing a huge collection of immutable files, like some archive. As 
soon as you expect the contents of the files to change, it will actuall 
be more efficient to have some free space after each file, to allow for 
it to grow without fragmenting /again/.

So the strategy employed by Windows' free defragger is probably not too 
bad - and don't forget it's a tool you get with the OS for free. (Not 
developed by MS themselves, btw.)

Post a reply to this message