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I work with real-time video apps, and just defragged my (Win XP) system to try to improve the general performance. It did... but it appears to have destroyed the generally contiguous nature of certain test folders filled with tens of thousands of sequential images.
Is there any utility that can make the contents of a particular folder as contiguous as possible on the disk so that the disk access time is minimised when reading files in that folder? That is... a folder-level defrag rather than a file-level one?
omatai
Posted 2012-01-09T21:48:45.403
Reputation: 273
2Just copying the folder should have a good chance of doing that. You can then delete the original. I guess for maximal effectiveness you'd do this from a live CD to minimise other activity on that disk. – RedGrittyBrick – 2012-01-09T22:07:08.580
If the file system is fat or fat32, defrag be it Mydefrag or windows, will not rearrange the folders themselves. making a full reorder defrag of Fat, only a partial defrag, a partial mess. Back in win98 days some defraggers were capable of doing the full file folder defrag (disktune). Most of the defraggers now will not touch FAT folders. Add to that the time it takes, and It can be effective to Copy the data to order. Like copy it all to another disk/partition compare it for insurance, then copy it back. FOR FAT. – Psycogeek – 2012-01-10T06:05:13.987
For what it is worth, I used Auslogics defrag 3.3.0.2 on my NTFS file system. My overnight tests are now on average taking nearly twice as long to run, and no longer complete overnight. – omatai – 2012-01-10T23:00:29.093
It's worth noting that defragmenting a folder is not the same thing as defragmenting the contents of a folder. Your question about the former is actually referring to the latter. – user541686 – 2013-03-19T04:56:41.473