HHow to Recover data from RAW Partition/Drive.Does 'optimal' mean maximizing contiguous areas of free space by clumping files, or does it mean minimizing file fragmentation? Answer: it depends. Is this a big problem? Not really, but it goes to show that 'optimal' depends on usage. As files are deleted and added, free space gets increasingly chopped up so that files become more and more fragmented. These structures themselves clutter the disk space, making it less and less likely that a large file can be allocated to a single contiguous area.

The allocation scheme tends to fragment files to keep them 'clumped' and creates (and allocates) its own file system structures to keep track of allocation. This works quite well for small to medium-sized files, but not very well for large ones. The scheme that is used for NTFS in Windows tends to allocate files in clumps. Trouble is, a one-size-fits-all allocation scheme may produce less than optimal results depending on how the disk is being used. After a session or two, the files are going to get heavily fragmented again as the I/O on profile folder is quite high, and you'll end up compulsively repeating the process of profile defragmentation after each FF session.Ĭlick to expand.I wouldn't say 'haphazardly' - there is an allocation scheme at work, intended to optimize the placement of files on the partition. What matters is that the files themselves are defragged so the heads do minimal seeking when opening/executing a file.Īlso, there is no point in defragmenting FF user profile in such a way.

It scans the drive starting from the beggining and fills the next free cluster with files that reside at the end, and so on.īut even if you succeed in defragmentig a folder into one contiguos space, except the eye-candy factor of dots lined up together in a defragmenter GUI, I think you won't benefit from it in any way - performance wise. 'Defrag & Optimize' will simply put existing HD data in one contiguos space to avoid future fragmentation. Neither of the options guarantee that the files from the same folder will reside in one contiguos space.

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag (for external data HDs) and it can 'Defrag' and 'Defrag & Optimize'. Click to expand.I would say pretty much random.

Stuck on wincontig