Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

Disk Defragmenter — PP

Synopsis

Defragments hard disks on the local computer to improve performance.

Description

Fragmentation is generally less of an issue with NTFS volumes than with FAT or FAT32 volumes, since NTFS usually needs fewer disk accesses than FAT to locate all the fragments of a file. However, a significant performance improvement in disk access can be achieved by regularly defragmenting all volumes and partitions, including NTFS volumes and partitions, on a Windows 2000 computer. Disk Defragmenter achieves this performance gain by:

• Consolidating fragments of files and folders by moving them to one location so that each file and folder occupies a contiguous segment of space on the volume. Disk Defragmenter consolidates all fragments of each file into a single contiguous block of space, but different files may occupy different blocks of contiguous space after defragmentation. In other words, Disk Defragmenter does not cause all files on the volume to be grouped into a single contiguous region of space on the disk.

• Consolidating free space to make it less likely that new files will become fragmented. Disk Defragmenter typically does not attempt to completely consolidate all free space on the volume, however, since this generally provides little improvement in performance.

For administrators familiar with Windows NT 4.0 Server, there was no tool for defragmenting disks. On the Tools tab of a volume’s property sheet (accessed through My Computer or Windows NT Explorer), ...