Anyone have any suggestions for reducing fragmentation when 3 passes of the defrag of Windows XP is unable to defragment these large files? On a larger drive it wouldnt be bad, but given that this is a 40GB HD, it makes for excessive fragmentation. Was working on a friends computer and came across this issue. One thought I had is that if i move these files to a 16GB thumb drive, then defrag, then move them back to the hard drive maybe this will solve the fragmentation by introducing them to a drive which is then adding to the larger area that is accepting writes to vs it being currently scattered/fragmented. But not SURE if this would solve fragmentation for these files.




Volume (C:)
Volume size = 37.24 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 25.41 GB
Free space = 11.84 GB
Percent free space = 31 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 28 %
File fragmentation = 56 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 15,234
Average file size = 2 MB
Total fragmented files = 6
Total excess fragments = 54,687
Average fragments per file = 4.58

Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 1.50 GB
Total fragments = 1

Folder fragmentation
Total folders = 2,382
Fragmented folders = 1
Excess folder fragments = 0

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 18 MB
MFT record count = 18,345
Percent MFT in use = 99 %
Total MFT fragments = 2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fragments File Size Files that cannot be defragmented
7,342 1.45 GB \PROGRAM Files\World of Warcraft\Data\expansion4.MPQ
10,119 2.51 GB \Program Files\World of Warcraft\Data\expansion2.MPQ
15,244 2.86 GB \Program Files\World of Warcraft\Data\texture.MPQ
15,027 3.13 GB \Program Files\World of Warcraft\Data\world.MPQ
No.
Do you understand what fragmentation is?
In a computer system it is normal and users should not have to do it often. The OS normally takes care of the issue.

In this context you mean hard drive file fragmentation. This is when a file is not contiguous on the Hard Drive. Real heavy fragmentary slows disk read performance. Windows 7 will normally take care of things for you. With some exceptions.

Reference:
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/01/26/how-windows-7-handles-disk-defragmenting/Yes I know what fragmentation is, but I am assuming that if I moved these files off of C: to say a 16GB thumb drive, and ran a defrag, that the gaping voids where these files data chunks resided would collapse and bind the REST of the data chunks more efficiently with minimal fragmentation. Then with these files reintroduced I am assuming they would be written mostly to the end of the existing data chunk in the AVAILABLE space that is allowed to be written to as available. Some data composing the file would fill say 4k voids for example in the defragmented data chunk that always will have some/little fragmentation, but I am assuming that the majority of the data composing these large files would now reside at the tail end of the data that was present before these files were written to the C: drive.

I haven't done this yet because I'd have to clean off a 16GB thumb drive to be clean to work with for data shuffle. Decided to run this idea past you all to see if it was the best method or perhaps there is a tool out there better than the defrag that comes with Windows XP OS.

I saw your link to Windows 7, which i already know that Win 7 is perfect at handling this problem on the fly while Windows XP is not, and that's what I am dealing with now. My friend has no intention on upgrading this computer to Windows 7 at this point since its just a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 HT with 1GB DDR 400Mhz RAM and a GeForce 6200 8x AGP Video Card with 256MB RAM. WoW runs fine on this system with 20-30 fps on lowest video settings and he doesnt have any money to buy anything better, and fortunately for him he is satisfied with playing older games that were intended for this older system and modern World of Warcraft patch 5.2 runs fine on it still.

I was also thinking that if he found a 160GB IDE HDD that fragmentation also wouldnt be so severe as it is for this 40GB HD in which the files that are fragmented compose almost 25% of the drives capacity. Windows XP with drivers etc uses about 8GB and then WoW is around 20GB in size.