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Consider the following case: a disk has two very large files stored one after the other - the first being slightly smaller than the second. As far as I know (and please correct me if I'm wrong) - If I delete the first - defragmenting the drive will NOT move the second to where the first was. Is there any way to tell the defragmenter to do that?

I want to store disk images on a drive, and that when I create a new one, and delete an old one - the defragmenter will compact them (-move them close together), so that there will be room for the next one, so that every image will be stored sequentially (-all of its bytes). If the files will not be "compacted" (in the sense mentioned above) - when the drive will have files till close to its end - it will start fragmenting the files. Which is what I want to avoid.

No 3rd party tools please.

ispiro
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First things first, you wont ever realistically be able to get the files perfectly side by side and may i ask why would you want to?

Secondly you need to tell us what filesystem it is for ntfs leave a small amount of freespace near the files to deal with expansion (but often it doesnt work well enough)

But the only way to realistically do it is to juggle the files around and force the system to have no other option but to override the files (overall so much effort)

Darkshadow2913
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You can't make Windows 7's defragmenter do exactly what you're asking for, so you'd have to look at 3rd party tools.

However, why are you so worried about a bit of fragmentation? Fragmentation is normal and a small amount of it will cause you absolutely no appreciable loss in performance.

misha256
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