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So I'm working with some really big hyperspectral image data files (> 2 Gig). I keep loading these files onto my main harddrive to work with them and then deleting them again to make room for other files so not surprisingly my hard drive has gotten seriously fragmented. The fragmentation of these files is slowing down my data processing programs significantly so I've been trying to defrag my hard drive. Unfortunately, the Defragmenter that comes with Microsort office can't handle defraging such huge files. After defragging twice, some of the files were still in over 4000 fragments. The only way I've found to get around this is copy the files onto an external hard drive, deleted them from the main drive, defrag the main drive, then copy the files back and defrag the main drive again. This is extremely time consuming so I'm wondering if any of the Jatraquero gurus no of a better defraggin program or can give me any advice on how to keep my hard drive from becoming so fragmented in the first place.
Right now I've to a portable 120 Gigabyte external drive that I've only had for 6 weeks. I copied about 80 Giga of stuff onto it from my office computer before I came to Germany and that still constitutes the lion share of the stuff on the disk yet when I just ran the Disk deframenter on it over 90% of the files were fragmented and there was an enormous list of large files that it couldn't defragment.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Are your partitions NTFS or FAT32? (I don't have a solution yet, but this will help looking it up.)
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Executive Software's Diskkeeper is the best defragging software I know of. It can run in the background when your system is idle (or the screensaver is displaying). So you never have to consciously run the defragger and it does a really good job without wearing down your drive (one major problem of defragging.)
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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One thing I forgot to mention, and this might not be worth doing at this point, but if most of your files are large, you may want to consider NTFS with a larger cluster size than the default 4k. This wastes space on smaller files, but on larger ones it can reduce fragmentation (because there are fewer possible fragments to begin with) and increase read/write speeds. Just a suggestion for next time you have to format, but not useful to solve your immediate problem.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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PerfectDisk seems to have more features aimed specifically at large file problems, including free space and single file defrags, but I can't find any review that speaks to your exact situation.
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Sorry PC, That was terribly inconsiderate of me. You are also terribly sweet and deserve much thanks.
My original comment directed to Dagonee was in part because he and I so often end up on the opposite sides of debates here. I just find it heart warming when someone I so often disagree with goes out of their way to help me. Dag epitomizes the phrase 'diagreeing with out being disagreeable'.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I agree with that. I love it when some nOOb comes in and claims that Dag and I are on the same side of all political and religious issues just because we get along well. I have some of the same views as Dag, but often we come to different conclusions with the same data. But we don't call each other names or flame each other.
So of COURSE we are all liberals together .... right, Dag?
That had to be one of the funniest threads of all time, IMO. I just wish I could remember the title of it.
Everyone here has been great when I asked for computer help as well, and I have learned a lot because of it. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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