Games Files that are fragmented... how to defrag when they dont

[DaveLembke]

Curious as to if there is a way to defrag large game files that seem to get skipped by the Windows 7 Defrag as well as Auslogics Defrag. The files are like 6GB or greater in size and it shows them as fragmented and I havent found a way yet to get them to not be fragmented. Tried uninstalling the game, defragmenting drive to collapse data to be more continuous, then reinstalling the game clean and I am right back to the same amount of fragmentation of 30% on a 164.7GB drive with the majority of the fragmentation being with the large game files of a 32GB game install, and other MMORPG games that consume 10GB to 25GB in size.

*Maybe its just the nature of excessively large files that chunks of it are going to fill in the holes between other data segments on the platters, however it seems as though there should be a way to give it a continuous segment somewhere on the drive in the empty area skipping over the smaller gaps that cause it to fragment and cause the drive to have to sweep excessively or spin extra revolutions to wait for the data segment to come around again to read in since there is 36GB free on a 164.7GB drive?

The only thing I havent done with this drive yet, which use to be a trick for better performance years ago was short stroking the drive by making a smaller partition special to an area for data to be located for a faster read. Quick look online it looks like there is a better method than just making a size blindly for the partition, but to test different sizes and look at graph info on performance to find the optimal size that is large enough for the data and not too large that the performance is not optimal: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-short-stroke-your-hard-drive-for-optimal-speed-1598306074

This would all be resolved with a SSD in that older system since it does have SATA ports, but I just figured I'd throw this out for discussion to see if there is a way to resolve the fragmentation issue. I might go the route of short stroking it if that is the direction to go. 


RAM needs to get cheaper so I can just load up the game files to a Ramdrive    Although this old computer maxes out at 4GB DDR2 

[DaveLembke]

Looking at battlenet was not much help. Decided to dig deeper to see if blizzard had any suggestions. I find it funny that their response was oblivious as to the fact that fragmentation hurts load time and data read performance. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267488190

Here was Blizzards response which i found funny and clueless about fragmentation:

Hi,

I have heard the defrag is not allowed to move some wow files. To answer your question, no these are files that are important to the game and should not be deleted.

If i may, what are you tying to accomplish with defrag?

Andres

Maybe I will go the path of short stroking it in its own partition on this drive for wow. 
Then pick up a cheap SSD in near future on a sale and place the game onto that to be done with fragmentation issues and large games.

[BC_Programmer]

I'd be asking the same question. Defragmenting files is a waste of time IMO. You've probably spent more time researching this than you would have saved in any reduced load time.

[Geek-9pm]

One can reduce load time by using sleep or hibernate mode.
Or create a task to turn on you PC and load the game five minutes before you want to play.

[DaveLembke]

You've probably spent more time researching this than you would have saved in any reduced load time.

When it comes to computers I have a tendency to waste lots of time on stuff that others would just give up on.    Was more curious as to if there was a way to get rid of the fragmentation of large files in case I had to help someone else some day, either here or a client etc. The file load time savings is small between fragmented and defragmented on this sata drive given its a first gen sata drive from 2004 running at 1.5 on SATA I technology, but the fact that there is fragmentation bothers me I guess. Sometimes I feel like I have OCD with computers in the fact that I will beat a dead horse at times to find solutions. Many are small victories that are not really worth the time put into them through rube goldberg configs or alterations to shave off 10% or less off of load times etc, which when it takes say 10 sec normally to load having it load in 9 seconds is not anything big, BUT HEY its more optimal for old hardware configured as such 

The SSD for this is the best solution I guess to make it faster for load times and fragmentation on a SSD doesnt matter. 

The motherboard supports SATA II even though a SATA I 164.7GB drive is installed. The SSD I had in this system for almost 3 years I killed and sadly no warranty coverage on it. Its acting like its a bricked drive. Mounts up, you can delete and create partition, but it hangs at the formatting of the SSD, so I then stuffed this 11 year old HDD into the system. Tried using OCZ's utility to flash the firmware and that too fails so its toast on this 90GB SSD.  The good thing is that for the same money paid about 3 years ago I can get a 240GB drive. 

[BC_Programmer]

I was going to mention contig previously, but I thought it no longer worked. I can't seem to find anything that indicates it doesn't work so not sure where I heard that.

Effectively it does pretty much what you are after- let's you defragment a single file, or, rather, it attempts to make that file contiguous on-disk.

This, of course, presumes nothing is using the file.

[Geek-9pm]

If the file scan be moved, they can be fragmented.
Create a small new partition. Copy the files to that new partition. Check for fragmentation.