Does a file copy 'defrag' the file?

M

mixsit

Well-known member
If you were to copy a file (or group of data like song tracks) to a 2nd _clean_ drive, would the new file be as if defraged. What if you then copied a second file to that drive?
I'm thinking that might be a quicker way to 'defrag' large files without doing the whole drive, by copying, making the 2nd drive the new 'working' drive. Also, having a copy of your data even befor defraging adds a back-up in case of problems.
 
mixsit,

> If you were to copy a file (or group of data like song tracks) to a 2nd _clean_ drive, would the new file be as if defraged. What if you then copied a second file to that drive? <

If you copy files to a completely blank drive the copies will indeed be defragmented. However, there will be a little space between the end of one file and the beginning of the next. If you then copy the file back to the first hard drive, it will probably be fragmented again. It depends on where the free space resides on the disk you are copying to. If there are a bunch of "holes" from where old files used to be, those holes will be used. Note that the method used to allocate file space and how holes are used was changed from Windows 98 to Windows 2000.

The real issues are:

1. Create partitions so you don't have one huge 40-80 GB drive, which takes much longer to defragment than the same number of GB spread across several smaller partitions.

2. If you have Windows 98, use Norton Speed Disk instead of the Windows defragger. In newer versions of Windows Norton is just as slow as the free one that comes with Windows. But for Windows 98 the Norton version is a lot faster.

--Ethan
 
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