Hi everybody,
my question is inspired by the following idea: When completly defragmenting a HDD ( e.g. called SmartPlacement by PerfectDisk ), it is often neccessary to "move out" files to make free space and then "move in" these files later. Especially on big HDDs with several TB capacity, the defragmentation process will be severly slowed down by this step, since the r/w heads have to travel in and out very often. Therefore my idea is: Imagine that you have one HDD which is heavily filled and fragmented, and a second HDD of identical size and geometry, which is totally empty. Now both HDD are taken offline at first, to prevent any changes during the defragmentation process. In a second step, all files on the first HDD are analyzed to make a detailed layout plan, where those files, directory stuctures and metadata have to be placed on the second HDD to achieve an exact, but already defragmented copy of the first HDD. And in a third step, the data is copied to the second HDD according to the layout plan. Of course such a hypothetical program would need very detailed knowledge about the file system which should be reorganized.
My idea is that this method would speed up the defragmentation process a lot, because it can read from the first HDD and write to the second HDD at the same time. The second advantage would be, that such a program would need much less movement of the r/w heads, which also significantly should speed up the defragmentation.
Has anybody of you ever heard that such a type of defragmentation program is in development ?
C.U. Picobot