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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Cloned Hard Drive Without Defragging

May 13th, 2014, 11:17

My old standard HD was on its last legs, so I cloned it to a new hybrid drive without having defragged it. Windows' defrag analyzer shows that the new drive is 0% fragmented, whereas the old drive is 4% fragmented. Is there a way to defragment the new drive, or would I have to defrag the old one, and repeat the cloning process all over again? Will it seriously impact performance if I neglect to perform the defragging prior to cloning? Thanks.

Re: Cloned Hard Drive Without Defragging

May 13th, 2014, 11:21

How did you "clone" it? If you did a file level transfer, the file fragments would be read and written without fragmentation.

Re: Cloned Hard Drive Without Defragging

May 13th, 2014, 11:26

lcoughey wrote:How did you "clone" it? If you did a file level transfer, the file fragments would be read and written without fragmentation.


I used a program called "XXClone" with the option "Back up the entire volume by copying all the files from scratch". I'm not sure what the technical implications of that would be, as I think the intent of the program is abstract that level of detail away from the user.

Re: Cloned Hard Drive Without Defragging

May 13th, 2014, 22:41

I agree with Spildit. The process of copying the files to the new drive will have put the file clusters on the drive contiguously so the drive is not fragmented.

Re: Cloned Hard Drive Without Defragging

May 14th, 2014, 18:54

TXRanger wrote:The process of copying the files to the new drive will have put the file clusters on the drive contiguously so the drive is not fragmented.


Awesome! Thanks, everyone.
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