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I have a TrueCrypt 7.1a volume that is about 50 GB in size, formatted with NTFS and has close to 100 MB of free space. I have close to 300,000 files in it. When I was setting this up, I did this intentionally to save space.
Since the files I have in the volume is very small in size (The largest file is probably 20 MB in size) I enabled the ``Compress this volume to save disk space" option. So, all the files in the volume are compressed with standard NTFS compression.
I then copied all of the files from my hard drive to the volume with the xcopy command. Everything went fine up to this point.
Since there are close to 300,000 files, opening the volume in Windows Explorer crashes it within a minute. So, when I need a file, I mount the volume and use the xcopy command to copy the file to my computer in the place where it needs to be.
The only problem is it's painfully slow. It's pretty much impossible to copy more than one file like this. I then analyzed the volume with the Windows Defragmenter tool and it said it was 38% fragmented. After seeing that I defragmented it. It didn't get far at all. Something like 10% through pass 1 about 10 hours in.
I tried to use UltraDefrag as well, after it stayed at 0.0% done after an hour, I thought it was useless to continue.
So, my question is, how can I defragment this volume? Is it even possible to with so little free space on the volume?
0xAether
Posted 2013-05-13T19:58:59.413
Reputation: 478
2You can't. You won't be able to move the larger files. Of course defragging won't help with the crashing. – Ramhound – 2013-05-13T20:01:30.050
@Ramhound I'm not concerned about Explorer crashing, I just use xcopy anyways. If I had to guess the largest file on the whole volume is about 20 MB. – 0xAether – 2013-05-13T20:04:58.200
If that was the case you can easily defrag the drive. The files must be larger then 100MB if you make no progress. You might be able to get around this be dragging the volume while its not attached although that sounds sort of risky. – Ramhound – 2013-05-13T20:06:41.463
2Create a new encrypted volume, and give yourself some growing space. Move files from old volume to new volume. When the move happens files will be transferred one at a time and not be fragmented. Keep in mind that almost every filesystem starts to behave badly after you have gotten beyond ~95% usage. Give filesystem some extra space. – Zoredache – 2013-05-13T20:10:18.153
@Ramhound I just checked, the largest file is 31 MB. And what do you mean by defragging while the volume isn't attached? – 0xAether – 2013-05-13T20:20:36.643
@Zoredache Looks like that is my only option. Copying the files off of it will take a very long time, though. – 0xAether – 2013-05-13T20:20:58.147
If the largest file is 31MB and it it too slow to do more than a single file with xcopy (which BTW, I don't get from your description), your issue is not fragmentation. with your new volume, don't compress the files and see if that makes a difference. – Frank Thomas – 2013-05-13T20:30:19.673
It must be the compression. Although it's weird how Windows said it was 38% fragmented and UltraDefrag said 98% fragmented. – 0xAether – 2013-05-13T20:38:40.260
"Since there are close to 300,000 files, opening the volume in Windows Explorer crashes it within a minute" Do you have all those files in one directory?? The theoretical limit is higher (http://superuser.com/questions/446282/max-files-per-directory-on-ntfs-vol-vs-fat32), but its a recipe for fragmented indices, defrag issues, explorer choking, and other protential problems (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/197162/ntfs-performance-and-large-volumes-of-files-and-directories). Reorganize your files into multiple folders.
– Jan Doggen – 2013-05-14T06:31:33.043@0xAether - I figured this volume was a mounted Truecrypt container which would mean it was freespace on a larger partition when it wasn't mounted. – Ramhound – 2013-05-14T11:01:43.317