Defragmenting over night did nothing

Dimitri

Member
I let defragmenter defrag my data partition over night and when I woke up it was on pass 5 and 25% done. I stopped it and the partition was still 81% fragmented. I don't recall the exact % of fragmentation before I ran it, but it was 80something, possibly 81%.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

The partition is 496 GB 57.6 free.

The Windows partition has 46 GB free (I don't know if it can use that space on another partition to move stuff around).
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
If i'm not mistaken, you need at least 15 percent available space for defrag to work correctly. You have 11.6 percent. You need a bigger drive. Can you post a screenshot of disk management?
 

Dimitri

Member
If i'm not mistaken, you need at least 15 percent available space for defrag to work correctly. You have 11.6 percent. You need a bigger drive. Can you post a screenshot of disk management?

I always figured the 15% was more like a rule of thumb and that maybe less than that ought to suffice, but maybe not, IDK. Anyway, defragmenter didn't report any issues or complain about lack of space, it just kept going but got nothing done.

Here's disk management (since my OP I filled up the data partition a little bit)
disk-management.jpg
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
So you basically have a 640gb drive partitioned into a 100 gb main partition and a 500 gb data partition. You need to buy a 1tb drive and clone the old to the new one. Then the data partition should be bigger for you. If not, its just a matter of moving the free space to the data partition. But to be honest, I would reinstall windows on the new drive anyway and then resetup partitions. Then just move data partition over. I would create a 125-150gb main partition and leave the balance for data.
 

Dimitri

Member
I can clean up the data partition enough to get to 15%, I have a lot of large temporary files that I'll be able to delete soon. It's just that I found it odd that it didn't manage to defragment, yet also gave no warning or error message. And this isn't the first time this has happened. I've been trying to defragment for a while.

I guess I'll try to get to 15% and run it then.
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
How old is this drive? What brand is it? To be honest, they don't even make 640 gb drives anymore as far as I know since they are Sata 2 tech. Most drives have a date code printed on them. If its more then 5 years old, I would think about replacing it anyway.
And with a full drive, it takes longer to defrag I think.
That it does. as it will take more read/write cycles to move data.
 
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