[SOLVED] Hard drive / fragmentation issue?

[Uberwolfe]

So I had a hard drive that recently started exhibiting signs of pending death.

I chucked in another drive and copied everything from the old drive to the new drive no worries.

Everything was dandy for about a week, then this new drive started to exhibit similar symptoms as the previous drive..

Significant slowdown/hanging when browsing the drive and opening files, taking a long time at post and loading windows etc.

I checked the fragmentation on the drive, and was very surprised to find that the entire file system was really really badly fragmented.. like the worst fragmentation I've ever seen.

My understanding is that when you copy files from one drive to another, the files are basically defragmented during the process, and should appear on the new drive fresh and without fragmentation?

I'm not sure what is going on here. Could it be a dodgy SATA or power cable or something?

Would be keen to hear any thoughts. Thanks!

 

[R_1]

fragmentation happens whenever a file is read and/or written.
Imagine the HDD is a book, the drive essentially rips the page out of the book when needed in RAM and instead of saving the pages back where they were, it just saves to the first free space it can find. so next time it needs to flip through the whole book to find the pages because they are not where the index says they are. my grossly oversimplified fragmentation explanation.
defragmenting puts the pages back where the index says they should be. not the perfect analogy but the gist is the OS wanting to be fast is sloppy with the filing which actually leads to slowness. the system is faster when the files for sugar are under S. so a defragmentation is suggested on platter drives regularly.
not so much of an issue with SSD as the access times are the same no matter which cell its stored in.

 

[Uberwolfe]

fragmentation happens whenever a file is read and/or written.
Imagine the HDD is a book, the drive essentially rips the page out of the book when needed in RAM and instead of saving the pages back where they were, it just saves to the first free space it can find. so next time it needs to flip through the whole book to find the pages because they are not where the index says they are. my grossly oversimplified fragmentation explanation.
defragmenting puts the pages back where the index says they should be. not the perfect analogy but the gist is the OS wanting to be fast is sloppy with the filing which actually leads to slowness. the system is faster when the files for sugar are under S. so a defragmentation is suggested on platter drives regularly.
not so much of an issue with SSD as the access times are the same no matter which cell its stored in.

Thanks, I appreciate the reply - and the analogy fits.

But if you're copying the first set of files to a brand-new freshly formatted drive, should these files fragment as badly as I mentioned above?

 

[R_1]

copy is the word. was the source drive fragmented?

 

[SkyNetRising]

Significant slowdown/hanging when browsing the drive and opening files, taking a long time at post and loading windows etc.

Check health of your drive. Use HDtune health.
Post screenshot (upload to imgur.com and post link).