Subscriber Bill Lomax wrote me to ask:
Have you ever defragged your drive "Freespace"???
My first thought was "How would you defrag freespace?"
Then, I realized that this was someone’s advertising term for a very interesting and impotant operation. For most people with today’s huge drives, it’s less of an issue, but for some operations, it’s still important.
My first experience with a defragmentation utility was that came as part of Norton SystemWorks back in the pre-2000 years. Not only did it defragment the files on the drive, it arranged the files at one end of the drive so that all the used drive sectors were together and all the free sectors were together. In other words, it consolidating the defragmented files to one end of the drive.
Yes, that’s what the disk optimizer in Norton Systemworks used to do. It may still, but I have not used versions later than Norton Systemworks 2002.
Bill wrote back to say:
I questioned this idea because Piriform has a program “Defraggler”
supposedly doing this “task”.
I have one application for which defragmentation of free space is important — my home theater PC.
Since it records shows at a rate of 1GB per 30 minutes, the files will get quickly fragmented as I watch and delete shows.
So, I have my home theater PC set to defragment its files and consolidate all the free space together a couple times a week, in the middle of the night.
and