[SOLVED] What happens when you defragment an HDD which has several partitions ?

[SomeGuyonTHW]

Sorry for stupid question but I'm really curious.
for example, we have a 5 terabyte HDD, with 5 partitions each one 1TB, also each of them are filled with 300 gigabytes of different folders files etc...
now what happens when we defrag this HDD?
does it depend on defragment tool? (in this case we're talking about Windows defragment tool and/or third party tools such as iObit Defragger)
does the app count all partitions as separate HDDs & dedicate a part of it to a certain partition then only defrag that part? or it just Moves all files together regardless of which partition it is in? thanks.

 

[lvt]

now what happens when we defrag this HDD?

Normally you don't defrag a HDD but a Disk (C, D, E...) which is a partition of the HDD.

If you didn't partition the HDD (for example there is only Disk C), the defrag tool will defrag the whole HDD as a single partition.

 

[TerryLaze]

does the app count all partitions as separate HDDs & dedicate a part of it to a certain partition then only defrag that part? or it just Moves all files together regardless of which partition it is in? thanks.

A partition is like the index of a book, it's just some information at the beginning of the disk that tells windows that the user wants the files on that partition to show up under a specific drive letter.
There are ways to create file lists to only fragment files that are on a specific partition but in general all files are being put together in the front of the disk.

Some defragmanters do leave space between files of different partitions, mainly between the OS and the rest of them because the OS changes often due to updates, the pagefile, and whatnot, so leaving some space allows for new files to be written without messing up older files.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

If your HDD has several partitions, the defrag utility will show each of them separately, and they will be processed separately.

 

[USAFRet]

now what happens when we defrag this HDD?

The files get defragmented.
Just like if there was a single partition.

 

[Bob.B]

Sorry for stupid question but I'm really curious.
for example, we have a 5 terabyte HDD, with 5 partitions each one 1TB, also each of them are filled with 300 gigabytes of different folders files etc...
now what happens when we defrag this HDD?
does it depend on defragment tool? (in this case we're talking about Windows defragment tool and/or third party tools such as iObit Defragger)
does the app count all partitions as separate HDDs & dedicate a part of it to a certain partition then only defrag that part? or it just Moves all files together regardless of which partition it is in? thanks.

Look at it as each partition is a disk.
Defrag will move stuff around within that disk.
It does not move stuff from one disk to another.