1
How can I manually move files on a physical hard disk? I want to move files which are never modified, only read, to the end of the partition, like movies or something.
1
How can I manually move files on a physical hard disk? I want to move files which are never modified, only read, to the end of the partition, like movies or something.
3
Firstly, excuse my English if it's bad!
You can achieve your goal of positioning rarely used files like video or music, with mydefrag scripting language.
By using its scripting language, you can create zones (in a partition with 3 zones, third zone is the end of partition) and place any specific files (choose a pattern like *.mp3
or *.avi
) and move them to the end of partition by giving your personalized script to mydefrag software.
2
There are plenty of tools with direct disk access that will allow you to write raw data to the disk. On Unix-based systems, the command dd
is usually available for that. On Windows, you'll have to rely on third-party software. You can write movies to the physical end of your hard drive that way and manually update the file system. On all but the most basic file systems, that would be quite a lot of tedious work and very uncommon outside the context of data recovery.
It is rather pointless, too. Defragmentation tools already do a reasonable job at moving files around to increase performance, and could easily undo your manual efforts. Disabling them would probably negate the performance benefits you are aiming for.
Nevertheless, there may be something to gain in storing infrequently accessed files on the slow end of your drive. The best way to achieve this would be to create seperate partitions, thus restricting where the files can physically go, similar to a technique called Short Stroking. Note that when the files are accessed on both partitions simultaneously, for instance when copying movies from one partition to another on the same drive, performance actually takes a severe hit due to the constant repositioning of the head.
Good advise. However, I won't call manually moving files pointless. – MC Emperor – 2012-09-27T15:19:10.443
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Note: If you are not up to read all, go to final part where i say some tools that have "move to end of the partition"... but if you want to know why some ones claim it must be a must to be able to "move to" what ever we want to whtever place inside the partition, read it full.
Creating partitions is not an option on some cases, like having all the disk encrypted by VeraCrypt and you beeing paranoid... explication is...
Why a paranoid would never ever do the next steps:
The answer is: unencripted data was written to the disk, so it is recoverable (no matter if it is overwritted or wiped, etc).
Oh, yes, there are some companies that can recover the 100 last states of each bit of a HDD and also of a SDD, memory card, etc... so if you had your data in plain (not encripted) and you overwrite it 99 times, the non encripted data is still recoverable.
To do such, they unbox the disk and use low level atomic analizers and a super-computer to be able to know what was there before... a simple way to understand such could be (for a magnetic surface, for SDD and memory card is somehow similar):
In numbers:
That final angle tells how many times a one has been written there.
Now imagine writes of mixed values...
Note: Such angle numbers ar ficticious, they are only just to show you a Zero and a One can have a lot of real physical positions of the materia that holds such data.
Of course... paranoid, really paranoid... recovering last 100 states costs near a billion of dollars, but can be done... and company says it can recover (on some cases, more states)... the dificoult part is to pair such changes... meant to ... one bit can be overwritten more times than another, so how to know which one was last written, previous write, previous to that... such is the top secret that company do not want to reveal (to not loose money income i think).
Now the bad NTFS implementation: NTFS native compression...
We all want two things:
So... to speed up things... we all want... this:
So head track minimizes while start and end part will not be fragmented any more, so next defrags will be shorter.
Another reason to want such inside a partition:
For that ones that has sub-folders, there is the trick of hard/soft links (Junction / MKLink tools)... but for others, all files are on the same folder... doing one MKLINK per file is a total lost of time, also more... some files are created and deleted dinamically so links/junctions are not an option.
Oh, and you can also mount a VHD (XP & Vista with a tool, Windows 7 and up can do it directly from disk aministrator) on any NTFS folder... so a folder can be really a VHD file... but again we want such file on the begining or on the end of the disk... this time extension filter will not be able to know where we want it... same extension for both.
And there are so many ohter reasons... that i could be written for years and not finish.
Only way i found it really works perfect:
Still searching for:
Next best:
For that last option i had tried: WinUtilities DiskDefrag
.
It is not fast at all, and it sometimes looks like glued on one file (hours to move a <1GiB file while with others >25GiB tooks a lot less)... maybe bad coded.
The other option i found (it requieres to learn LUA coding language) is: UltraDefrag
.... (i am still trying to learn how to do it with LUA, i am noob on LUA).
-1
Try Vopt defrag tool, by which after analysing drive you can manualy move files where ever you want at the end of the drive too.
1I'm not sure if this is a useless answer, or a spam answer, but either way, it seems like something you ought to work on fixing. – HopelessN00b – 2014-09-05T06:12:13.457
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Your idea was one of mine a time ago. But after a while a realized that the easiest and equally usefull way to do this is creating another partition and moving files to there. In windows 7 you can reduce the size of an existing partition, without losing contents, creating a new free partition. Of course, only if the first partition was not completely used. Better saying, if none of its files occupes a sector at the end of the partition. For example, if you have moved files to the end or partition, as using the sugested tools, you could not resize partition anymore. Sorry my english, I hope have been clear.
2You don't really provide an answer that can be acted upon - it is mostly theoretical. – albal – 2015-08-10T01:48:33.957
If you're running windows 7 the regular defrag process will do a decent job of optimizing their placement. Without checking up on it, I think fragments of 64kb in size for large files will perform optimally even if each chunk is scattered all over the place. Not sure if the defragmenter worked this way in Vista as well. – Melikoth – 2012-09-27T12:04:19.820
You can create multiple partitions. One of them at the end of the disk. (Or at the beginning of the disk, whichever you define as the slowest part of the drive, since HDD speed is mostly irrelevant when you watch a movie). – Hennes – 2012-09-27T12:27:28.727