Author Topic: Copy files avoiding fragmentation  (Read 10964 times)

vranitzky

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 1
    • View Profile
Copy files avoiding fragmentation
« on: December 31, 2017, 12:45:28 »
Hello.
I am trying to copy all the files from one USB drive to another (both formatted in NTFS).
I was hoping to get all the destination files defragmented, as it is newly formatted, but absolutely every file end up being at least 3 fragments!
This comes down to the Read/Write chunk size. Apparently, multicommander will split files at that boundary, preactically guaranteeing that files will be fragmented. This feels to me like a very bad flaw, or I am missing an option to prevent this?
Would putting the chunk size to 0 solve it? And if it does, why isn't this the default?

Mathias (Author)

  • Administrator
  • VIP Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4416
    • View Profile
    • Multi Commander
Re: Copy files avoiding fragmentation
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2017, 14:30:48 »
Read/Write chunk size does not have anything to do with this. Optimal settings of this between drive and OS can give higher speed.
Also to high can affect performance of other operations on the drive since a read/write of a chuck must be completed before another program can access the drive.

It is the filesystem that decide on how to split it. And on if the drive is a SSD, it will be less strict in keeping them in order since it does not matter on SSD
All MC can do is to give a hint to the OS on how large the file is and such. And it is up to the OS/Filesystem driver to handle this.
MC do not decide on where the data is written.
There is so files can be preallocated to guarantee that the same is not taking by other application. but this is not yet supported, (Coming soon) But this should not effect how files are fragmented.
If there are multiple write at the same time to the drive. It might affect fragmentation.