(no subject)

[rhyme]

I've just defragged this hard drive for the first time. It took...um a really long time. All last night and it only finished a couple of hours ago.

But it managed to magically find an extra 30 gigs or so of empty space. I'm not sure if it were supposed to do that, but I'm taking it to mean that I'm supposed to defrag hard drives on a more regular basis. Also, the shop that sold the hard drive cases for reasonably cheap is gone now, and I still don't know what kind of hard drive my old computer had. Getting things off of it is looking worse and worse.



Edit: also, the files that didn't defrag are the files that would have probably benefited the most, so I'm running the program again.

Comments

[afe-coda.livejournal.com]

Defrag doesn't fix any problems (except maybe squeezing out a tiny amount of additional performance) and if you suddenly got 30GB of extra space something else is going on.

[ririkit.livejournal.com]

I have no clue. All I know is that a little after I started the defrag, I checked and it had found an extra 7 gigs. When I woke up the next morning, it had found a lot more.

In the absence of any other ideas, I'm blaming Vista. :[

[adewski2many.livejournal.com]

What if it's a huge hard drive full of tiny fragments smaller than the cluster size? If one were to concatenate them into full clusters, quite a few empty clusters would suddenly come into being.

[afe-coda.livejournal.com]

What brain-dead filesystem would let a file incorporate more than one unfilled cluster? Packing multiple unrelated files into a single cluster is a fairly advanced filesystem technique (Reiser4 is the only one I know of offhand that does it, but maybe ext4 does too) that I wouldn't expect to see in NTFS and I know for sure is definitely not in any form of FAT.