Windows 7: Which sector of the hdd drive are the file fragments positioned in?

When I transfer files or download files into a hard disk, which sector of the hdd drive are the file fragments positioned?

If I am not mistaken, the foremost outer sectors, which are also the most accessible and fastest sectors, of the hdd are taken up first right?


Is there any way for me to choose which sectors the files will end up in?
This is especially when I want to defragment my hard drive (when I need to).
I want my more frequently accessed files to be the top most sectors...


Also, if I create a new partition, the first partition will be the foremost partition right?

Yes to the first question, but the thing is the specified file gets broken up into fragments along the outer most sections of the harddrive which causes fragmentation and loss of speed to access of the file unless they are defragmented, but yes in my experience when I look at a virtual image of my harddrive through my defragmenting program the data is dispersed to the outer towards the inner or slower part of the drive.

2nd question is yes and no. Yes if you use UltimateDefrag you can place files where ever you want on the hard-drive. It the only defragger that can do that, that I know of, but no I don't know of any other way other than physically moving the files without this type of software the files you download and setup on the computer will go where its fastest and most convenient for it.

3rd question is yes if you have a drive and you want to partition it generally speaking it goes from the outer toward the inner as far as drive letters are concerned so C:\ would be the outer and E, F, G or whatever would partition toward the center of the drive. A little bit of advice from experience that partitioning a drive can actually slow the drive down a better way to speed it up is by shrinking the volume and leaving the rest unallocated. My 500gb Seagate sata is done that way it's now 200gb. The reason not to format the partition is that if your going to write to the partition information that is on your primary to another formatted partition on the same drive the drive has to work twice as hard to move the data but it's fine to partition other drives in the system I personally don't recommend the Primary..Some people will argue that but they have a right to their opinions...

One additional observation, and a question: If one is defragmenting their drives as they should, what are the real performance gains to be achieved by specifically designating file locations? I mean, performance gains that are truly noticeable.

1) Fast access to frequently used files is usually achieved by installing the OS and program files on the outermost, fastest partition on the hard disk, the C: drive. The inner partitions (D:, F: etc. are slower) and should be used for data storage. This applies to platter drives.

2) You cannot specifically select a physical sector to save/download a file to, you can only choose the partition. Once you have done that, windows will save the file starting from the first available location. Let me give a very simple example.

Imagine that you are saving a 1 Mb Word document on the hard disk. After saving the Word document, imagine you saved to your hard disk a 3 MB image. The disk writer head will go through the disk and look for the first available space – which happens to be the space following the last kilobyte of the Word document. Thus, the 3 MB image will be saved in the space next to the Word document.

Afterwards, imagine you trim your Word document to 700 KB and save it, that leaves 300 KB free immediately after the Word document and before the 3 MB image. When you save yet another file, say a 2 MB Excel file, the hard disk will follow its rule of saving data on the first available space. Thus, the Excel file will be split into two parts - 300 KB would be written on the 300 KB free space and the rest will be placed in the next available space – after the image file.

I suppose it won't be noticeable for small hard disks. But for 1TB and above, i think it might make a difference in terms of opening+loading time of about 1-3 seconds for files?

Also for a 1TB hard drive, 15% fragmentation is about 150GB of stuff. That's a lot. Even 1% fragmentation is alot already.