I finally bit the bullet and converted my games FAT32 partition into an
NTFS partition (MS has made that surprisingly easy and much more surprisingly
fast). I got tired of defragging taking something like 30-40 *hours* on that
200GB partition. (Also Windows refuses to move directory entries in a FAT32
partition, which means that the partition is littered with small unmovable
clusters which make a clean defragging much more difficult.)

  After the conversion I tried defragging (the partition was quite badly
fragmented) and it took a bit over an hour. That's quite a huge improvement
over the typical 30-40-hour defragging of the old FAT32 partition.

  (This was not just Windows' own defrag, which is content with just
defragging individual files, regardless of where they might end up in
the disk, in other words, the files themselves end up defragmented yes,
but the disk itself still becomes completely littered with holes of random
sizes. Instead, I used MyDefrag's full defragmentation mode, which moves
all files inside a directory to be physically consecutive in the disk,
without empty space between the files, so almost every single byte in the
disk is moved at least once. In fact, if I had run this on the FAT32
partition it might have taken 30 days rather than 30 hours.)

  I'm really wondering why defragmenting an NTFS partition is so much faster
than a FAT32 partition.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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