Defraggler Reddit
Trinidad Baltzell
So I ran Defraggler - it ran for over 24 hours with a couple stoppages but that is a whole other story and not important (I hope) - other than a waste of HDD 'usage' but 'in for a penny, in for a pound' so I kept it going
Consolidation is what was wanted/needed in the days of smaller drives, and so it is what most people historically think of as 'defragmenting' even though it's really Consolidation.
With todays larger drives it's not needed as much, and because it can take ages on a large drive experienced users avoid doing it.
With a 1TB drive that's over 70% full a drive consolidation can take a long time, even after you had removed the 500GB of files the remaining files may still have been scattered all over that 70% of the drive so would take some time to consolidate.
To pack the files into the least number of clusters Consolidation can actually leave some files more fragmented than before, which seems to be what you are seeing here.
ie. The files have been moved into a smaller space on the drive (which I think is what you wanted) but to do that they have been fragmented more than they were before.
See this link for how to do a 'Files only' defragment without the consolidation, that will get the files into one piece each and the fragmentation percentage down, it will also be much quicker than trying to consolidate the whole drive.
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Having done that do another Analyze and look at the Drive Map to see where the files are located. I think they may possibly be reasonably consolidated already.
For example this is a 500GB drive with 65GB used and 1% file fragmentation (the red bits).
It's reasonably consolidated, most of the clusters are together at the start, so I wouldn't bother consolidating it anymore.
If you do still want to consolidate the drive to try and get 'all the files at the start with no gaps' (the Holy Grail of drive consolidation, it's hardly ever achieved) then do a consolidation only - that will still take a long time with a 1TB drive.
To do a 'Consolidation only' use Action>Advanced>Defrag Freespace. Don't use the "Allow fragmentation" option, that will just fragment your files again to try and pack them in tighter.
Once you have got the files consolidated you should normally stick with just doing 'Files Only' from then on.
Hi Thank you very much for all of that information. I had read another of your posts (I believe the one you linked to) prior to posting my question - and yes, I did assume that Defraggler was "just" going to de-fragment...the button I have is just called "Optimize" so I blindly clicked on that assuming the program knew best. I was wrong. Too used to loving CCleaner.
My HDD at the start of the "Optimize" was 200GB - most of that the original load of things a couple of years ago. I wish I had the screen shot but most of the little boxes below the 3rd level were white/clear aka "empty". I am at a total loss of how Defraggler adds over 377GB of data to my drive. Like I hope I mentioned originally Defraggler itself was identifying only 50GB needing work/"Fragmented Files". I say all that to ensure you still think OK to "File only Defrag"
So forget all of my above post, that advice is for a HDD and not for a SDD. - See below for new advice more relevant to a SSD.
If you have started doing any of it on your SSD then simply click the 'Cancel' button and wait for it to tidy up what it's currently doing up and stop.
Yes that is important with an SSD - Because of the 'stoppages' defraggler was unable to clean up those temporary files it had made, so they got left behind taking up disc space.
You can simply delete those DFOptimise files yourself.
As I said above I personally would not use a 3rd party tool such as Defraggler on an SSD; let Windows and the SSD itself look after it.
(Windows will ocasionally 'TRIM' the SSD, and then the 'garbage collection' built into the SSD itself will organise it as needed).
Of course it's your choice of what you want to use.
I would firstly delete those DFOptimize files to get your disc space back.
Then open Windows 'Defragment and Optimise Drives' and check that it's set to run weekly like mine is above.
If you want to you could then click on 'Optimize' there to make Windows run one straight away and TRIM the SSD.
Before running the "winsat formal", I decided to see what Win 10 saw...it sees a HDD (see attached). So it is a Defraggler problem. So far, looks like I lost 30GB of space (fixing 50GB of fragmented files) for some random Defraggler reasons and years off of the life of the HDD. Defraggler thinks I have over 80GB of Fragmented files - presumably the original 50 + the new 30 but who knows. Pictorially my drive looks bad (but you tell me) with a whole lot of "low occupancy fragmented files". And yes, I am using the most recent version of Defraggler v 2.22.995
It is not unusual for Windows to have differing information in different places, so it would depend just what Defraggler is reading, and what file from.
I think that Defraggler reads it from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
Defraggler doesn't try to determine the drive type itself, it would need a large database to store a record of every type of drive, so software such as Defraggler usually queries the Windows information and trusts what Windows says it is.
It's not just Defraggler that has this issue with HDD/SSD drive types, if you do a websearch you'll see it's a common issue, and even Windows built in 'Defragment and Optimise Drives' gets it wrong for some users.
So what happened to you was a combination of a couple things.
Defraggler though the drive was a SSD and so was Optimizing it instead of Defragging/Consolidating - Then that Optimisation got stopped a couple of times, for whatever reason, and so each time it was stopped left stray files behind taking up space.
First - If you haven't already - then using File Explorer manually delete all of the 'DFOptimize' files that Defraggler couldn't clean up because it was stopped a couple of times.
(Then empty your Recycle bin so they are completely gone from the Windows file information).
That should give you (most of) the 'lost' space back.
Next - If you haven't already - Run the winsat formal command to update Windows records of what hardware you have in your machine.
If that updates things so that Defraggler then sees the correct drive type all well and good.
However if Defraggler is still seeing it as the wrong type then as you are sure that your drive is a HDD you can ignore what Defraggler thinks it is.
Next - To get the file fragmentation (red blocks) down do a 'Files only' Defragment as per the link I gave in my first post above.
Defraggler will warn you that it's not what you should be doing on a SSD, but as you are sure it isn't a SDD anyway then just ignore that warning, click Yes, and carry on.
If you want to you could then do a 'Defrag Freespace', see my first post above, to get clusters together with less white gaps ie. Consolidation. It will take time to defrag the freespace.
Again Defraggler will warn you about doing that on a SSD, but again as you are sure it's a HDD you can ignore that warning.
Once you've done all that, or as much as you want to, then please come back and report the results.
(I have noticed something else in you last screenshot, (the pagefile), it's not very important and I don't want to confuse you with it here. One step at a time hey)
I am very confused by where else Win 10 would store this info (tell me where to check if it matters) that could be different from the Win 10 drive optimization program pulls it. Also - if Defraggler does not pull its data from the same place as the Win 10 drive optimization program - that would be very weird to me.
But I ran that "winsat formal" anyways - no idea what it did as no idea where to see the results but...I shut down Defraggler and started it again and voila - it still thinks it is a SSD. Win 10 still thinks it is a HDD.
If I run the "Defrag freespace" is that going to be another 30 odd hours of Defraggling again. Will the File only defrag be a 30 hour defrag again as well? And if the answer is "no" - what are you basing that answer on? What is different this time?
The File only defrag should take about 20 to 30 minutes in my guess - that is a guess but from experience of doing it on drives with about the same level of file fragmentation.
Various things come into play, such as your CPU speed, how much RAM you have, whether it's connected internally by SATA or externally by a USB cable, and of course how fast your disc can physically read/write.
(You appear to have a 1.8 Ghz CPU that boosts to 4.43 GHZ, 8 GB of RAM, and it's an internal drive - so it should be reasonably quick).
Freespace defrag, again going from my previous experiences, I would expect to take around the 3 to 4 hour mark from what was showing on your latest screenshot for a 1TB drive. (225 GB of files is quite a bit to shuffle about).
But again there are too many factors to give anything more than an estimate, which could be wildly out.
Remember that once you have done this initial sorting out then future regular (file only) defrags are going to be much quicker because they'll have less work to do.
Like anything else, once you have put in the initial hard work it's easier to keep on top of things in future.
You can always 'Stop' a defrag if you think it's taking too long - but do it properly and after clicking 'Stop' let Defraggler finish what it is currently working on and tidy up before closing it. (Otherwise you might get lots of temporary files left over, LOL).
(You can then re-Analyze later to see what has been done and what is still needed).
One thing - did you Restart your computer (Restart not Shutdown/Boot) after runing winsat?
It's usually a good idea to do the occasional Restart to clear Windows of old information. (A Shutdown doesn't clear as much).