Hey There,
I have a win2k machine with a 4.3gig Hard drive that has
33% free space. I cannot get win2k to give me a good
defrag thereby keeping the drive response slow. Any
suggestions?
Lee
Actually, NTFS is much more resistant to fragmentation than FAT16/32. The
built in defragger does what it's supposed to do. If you have 33% free
(=available) space, than that's what you've got. Defragging can't increase
that, because the amount of space used by files is a function of the file
cluster size (each file uses at least one cluster) and file size. (If a file
size is just a little larger than whole multiple of the file cluster size, it
will use another file cluster, but it will be mostly empty. This unused space
is called slack space.)
Mind you, the total file size in bytes does _not_ equal the total space used
on the disk, since every file with have some slack space at the end of the
last cluster. Hence the "bytes used" and "bytes available" statistics tend to
be more or less misleading.
Drive response speed depends on
a) spindle speed;
b) drive cache size (the one in the drive itself) and associated firmware
c) seek time of the read/write head
d) front side bus speed
e) OS design
None of these are under your control. If you bought a bargain computer, you
have a slow drive and a slow front side bus. There's nowt yer can dew 'baat
that, son.
HTH
