How to shift all free space on hard disk to get contigous free space?

My NTFS non-system partition is now almost well defragmented. However this applies only to small and medium sized files.

There are still approx 40 big files (> 1 GB) which cannot be defragmented because there is no free single (!) space slot where they fit in.

So I need a way to shift all occupied clusters to get free contigous space on my hard disk.
Currently about 150 GB is be free on my partition but divided into thousand of individual chunks.

I tried now half a dozend of defragmenters.
Sad but true: NO (!) one was able to perform this easy operation.

Can someone recommend me a real defragmenter which is able to perform such a "shift" operation?

Thank you
Peter

I'm not sure exactly what you have and exactly what you are trying to do.

I personally use Windows 7 built in defrag and have found nothing better.

Windows 7 will put things like Windows 7 wants and needs things put.
The Windows 7 defrag or 3rd party defrag programs doesn't care where you want things put or what order you want them.

As far as I know you will have no control over such things.
You are obviously using a 3rd party defrag tool because you are watching the little colored squares and noticing what looks like free spaces between things. Why things are defragged in the fashion they are I really don't know.
What I do know is Windows 7 defrag put things in the order that Windows 7 wants them and that is what counts.

I would only think of getting a sizeable external and copy everything to it, format the existing one and copy everything back. I let Windows manage the defrag also as Layback Bear mentioned.

Only program that I've come across that clams this type of thing is UltimateDefrag from DiskTrix, which is a commercial program

DiskTrix

There was a freeware version and as the last stable official issue was in 2012 there may be a Public Domain version about

I'll Second GoKay's Suggestion about an External as it then serves another purpose, which is BACKUP. You can get a 4TB External Seagate from Walmart for PS4 - USB based and it doesn't care what OS but keep in mind it is an SMR disk so going to be very slow after the cache is full (laptop size with speeds around 1000RPM)


Freeware to handle things like this include the MS SyncToy - unsupported but does a wonderful job for bulk backups or my preferred FreeFileSync: Open Source File Synchronization & Backup Software as it's under development.

In case anybody stumbles across this old thread:
O&O defrag

Registration for your FREE license of O&O Defrag 22

Download Archive

Defragmenting is highly overrated anyway. The time you have spent trying the different defrag programs and otherwise tinkering to achieve what you want will never be regained by the minimal performance increase you may gain.

I did something like this recently, the defrag program MyDefrag V4.31 using preset "data disk daily"
works very well for this

I hope no one is defragging a SSD or flash-based mediums...

strollin said:

Defragmenting is highly overrated anyway. The time you have spent trying the different defrag programs and otherwise tinkering to achieve what you want will never be regained by the minimal performance increase you may gain.

Click to expand...

Unless you can post at least four paragraphs citing your sources, this is nothing more than conjecture.


Depending on how fragmented a HDD may be, it can and will have an adverse reaction to hard drive seek times, therefore expediently decreasing the read speed of the head.

In one example, back in the day using flight simulation software, fragmentation could be a major factor due to the Sim pulling its data from the HDD for terrain. During the course of flight there may be many hundreds if not thousands of seeks to retrieve the data for the terrain you're flying over. This could be even more complicated if you have third-party satellite data and other terrain enhancing add-ons to perhaps enhance town and city landscapes. When flight simulators were used in the days of platter hard drives, you'd want to keep HDD fragmentation to a minimum in an effort to increase performance. Otherwise as you fly along you'll notice the terrain below load at a slower rate then what would be desirable and negating that "as real as it gets" experience.

Now today with flash-based mediums, fragmentation is a thing of the past. But if a user is writing and reading from a platter at a considerable level over the course of time, and the program or application is dependent on high throughput seek time, then defragmentation would be warranted. This may be true for a computer whose sole function is as a HTPC, CCTV storage, or as a web server of sorts. Whether it be for a website or as an email server. Lower seek times, higher latency requests or jerking video, etc.

By in large Windows will clear up the fragmentation, but other programs might have better algorithms to do it that much better. In order to know how each program fares would require a manufacture's tool or something to see the real data spread on the HDD.

Back in my XP days I was a HDD speed nut to the point I averaged all the data files on my HDD by size and picked a cluster size that best matched my data's size for that much better read and write speed. I even utilized the SATA I connectors in my Dell Dimension 4600 for better throughput.

I upgraded everything in that computer except the motherboard. Hard drives, GPU, PSU, CPU, RAM and a 5.1 Creative sound card for my surround sound that I still use to this day. It was my little workhorse and it ran Call Of Duty Modern Warfare quite well in about circa 2008. Some of the mods were really taxing my CPU though. The CPU was the highest speed I could use on the motherboard at about 3.0 GHZ. It was a Pentium 4 Northwood CPU. I still have it to this day.