Question about fragmentation and moving folders . . .

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stan Shankman
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Stan Shankman

Greetings all,

If I wish to move a bunch of folders from one drive to another, I cut them
and paste them over to the new drive. The move starts up as indicated by the
"Move Progress" window. Now, if I should discover that I did not include all
of the folders I wished to move, I can go ahead and cut the additional ones,
and move them too. So now, I have two "Move Progress" windows open - both
depositing files on the same drive.

My question is: Will this cause fragmentation?
How exactly will NTFS handle this situation?

Intuitively, one might suspect that it would cause fragmentation, but at the
same time it is conceivable that it would not. Short of conducting
experiments, I'm not sure how to go about finding the answer.

Thanks all,

- Stan Shankman
 
Stan Shankman said:
Greetings all,

If I wish to move a bunch of folders from one drive to another, I cut them
and paste them over to the new drive. The move starts up as indicated by the
"Move Progress" window. Now, if I should discover that I did not include all
of the folders I wished to move, I can go ahead and cut the additional ones,
and move them too. So now, I have two "Move Progress" windows open - both
depositing files on the same drive.

My question is: Will this cause fragmentation?
How exactly will NTFS handle this situation?

Intuitively, one might suspect that it would cause fragmentation, but at the
same time it is conceivable that it would not. Short of conducting
experiments, I'm not sure how to go about finding the answer.

Thanks all,

- Stan Shankman
Click to expand...

Copying files in two separate processes can indeed cause
fragmentation. However, you would not notice any difference
in performance. While it seems to appeal to some people to have
a nicely defragged partition, in most cases you would have to
use a stopwatch to notice any difference in speed, so why worry?
(I'm now bracing myself for the backlash from the defragging
brigade. They defrag religiously every week, they never use
a stopwatch to gauge the effect of their frequent defragging
and they tend to be dogmatic about their habits.)

NTFS, same as other file systems, can easily cope with fragmented
files. It does not care in the least where on the disk it finds the
bits and pieces belonging to a file, same as your brain does not
care where it stores the street map of your town. It's probably
all over the place!
 
Pegasus,

Hey guy, thanks for the reply.

I'm with you, and I never worry too much about fragmentation. In this day
and age of massive-capacity and fast hard drives, fragmentation just doesn't
seem to be the issue it once was.

I just interested interested in knowing how NTFS handles that multi-process
file move. You see my thoughts? Does NTFS first allocate all of the needed
sectors and then proceed to do the data move, or does it simply move each
file one-by-one, and leave it to the disking sub-system to fetch-up whatever
sector comes next.

You say you know the answer, but how did you acquire this information? Is
there some online reference you can point me to? Something that will explain
the algorithm used on this multi-folder move operations?

Thanks,
- Stan Shankman
 
Sorry, I have never dug this deep into the inner workings of
NTFS to answer your question with any degree of competence.
You may have to think of some clever search strings in order
to get your preferred search engine to point you to a good
paper on the subject.
 
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