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I have a TrueCrypt 7.1a volume that is about 50 GB in size, formatted with NTFS and has close to 100 MB of free space. I have close to 300,000 files in it. When I was setting this up, I did this intentionally to save space.

Since the files I have in the volume is very small in size (The largest file is probably 20 MB in size) I enabled the ``Compress this volume to save disk space" option. So, all the files in the volume are compressed with standard NTFS compression.

I then copied all of the files from my hard drive to the volume with the xcopy command. Everything went fine up to this point.

Since there are close to 300,000 files, opening the volume in Windows Explorer crashes it within a minute. So, when I need a file, I mount the volume and use the xcopy command to copy the file to my computer in the place where it needs to be.

The only problem is it's painfully slow. It's pretty much impossible to copy more than one file like this. I then analyzed the volume with the Windows Defragmenter tool and it said it was 38% fragmented. After seeing that I defragmented it. It didn't get far at all. Something like 10% through pass 1 about 10 hours in.

I tried to use UltraDefrag as well, after it stayed at 0.0% done after an hour, I thought it was useless to continue.

So, my question is, how can I defragment this volume? Is it even possible to with so little free space on the volume?

0xAether
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1 Answers1

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@Zoredache touched on this in the comments on your question, but let me expand on it a little bit.

At a minimum, any drive should have about 10% minimum free space(20% if you have an OS on the drive), this is because the filesystem needs that extra space to store temporary files and journal information to perform its operations efficiently.

Any operation will be exponentially slowed the less free space you have on the drive past about 10% and defragging is the most free space intensive operation you can perform on a drive.

In this situation you need to transfer the files to another drive that is large enough to hold them, then you can expand the 50 gb partition to ~100 gb if you intend to continue to add files to it or ~65-70 gb if you do not. Afterward you can move all the files back.

jjno91
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