I have been using Smart Defrag for years and don't have a single complaint.

nonsense! you SHOULD, if you want control over your technology and not your technology controlling your actions.

Let me guess, you also disable Windows services that you don't use to boost your system's performance, right?

and let me guess, you're full of judgment and down-looking for people who do things differently than what you think is best?

I judge nobody. I can laugh freely, however.

*Know* that you are laughing at your own ignorance, then.

and from your own arrogance

I figure you trust doctors too

I guess I am too ignorant trusting engineers with hundreds of combined years of experience.

Wow! Not the results I expected, but thank you!

The best way to defrag the drive fairly quickly, would probably be just to transfer it to another drive. So format the drive, prepare it to boot from (if it's the OS disk), then copy all files directly over so they allocate continuous full blocks of all files.

As a note i believe Linux/Unix systems have fewer fragmentation issues due to how the OS allocates drive space and deals with file allocation/removal, but i never delved quite that deep... The Inodes and all that was confusing to follow; Not to mention you could expand the drive much easier than say FAT32 or NTFS.

Not sure what you mean by that. Disk management -> Extend Volume.

I don't know all the low-level specifics, but i know enough on the basic FAT types, where expanding them usually involves resizing the sector/cluster size and requires careful management not to corrupt your data. Ext2 (and related types) instead you can just add more via layers (typically was 2-3 layers), there's just a limit on how many individual Inodes you have when you make the original FS, i think usually 200,000...

I dunno why you would mention FAT or FAT32 nowadays. It wasn't relevant back in 2001 when XP was released, and it is not relevant today either.

One thing I should mention about extending volumes is that the space that you're expanding to has to be continuous, as in, there must be no other volume between the one you're extending and the free space you're taking. But I am not sure if this is a Windows only thing or a file systems in general thing. You can however move volumes left and right to bypass this issue, but you always have to be careful with that regardless of the file systems in use.

It's not as relevant today for PC's, but it is for other devices. MP3 Players might still make use of FAT16/FAT32 for simplicity. I think i have a few external drives that are FAT32, i just don't have huge individual files. But that would be my 300Gb or smaller drives...

In theory the OS could take the whole area including what's used, and then just mark that area as used with a filename attached to it with a big fat DO NOT DELETE/USE option, or mark it as bad sectors.

And it's more Windows than anything else. Since Windows is based on it's MS-DOS roots of using letters for drives, you force separation, while in Unix environments you mount it to the root somewhere, letting you swap out one drive for another, or expand an area while being transparent otherwise. More recent versions of windows do seem to have a mounting option for directories, but i haven't gotten it to work, and i'm not fighting too hard to figure it out either.

Maybe it's also related to the basic IDE hardware most systems came with which was cheaper than RAID or SCSI; RAID has an option where it will append one drive/partition to another letting you expand the drive's capacity as a whole. Sounds cool, but it really depends on the use.

By more recent versions you mean Win2K onward, right? Not sure if NT also had that option, but it was definitely there on Win2K.

Maybe, i'm not sure. But mounting to the filesystem vs a drive letter for windows is not used often, at least by the majority of normal users...

Of course making virtual drives, mounting ISO's and Ramdisks aren't easy/integrated in Windows anymore either...