Question: There are 3 terms used in the Windows defrager. Relocated, consolidated and defragmented. Can someone give me some clarification of them?
Answer: The only explanation I have found is the following. It seems a reasonable explanation.
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The sequence is Relocated, Defragmented and Consolidated.
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Relocated likely refers to gathering the chunks of non-contiguous ?blocks into some semblance of order from wherever they are on the ?disk.
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Defragmented likely means that each chunk then gets defragmented into ?something that more closely resembles the files they are a part of.
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Consolidated likely means that each piece of the files is pulled from ?wherever the previous relocation and defragmentation put them into ?chunks of similar files.
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That is one pass.
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But since the defragmenter did not move all your files so that the ?more consolidated chunks (or file) can neatly sit within one ?contiguous piece of disk acreage, probably for performance reasons – ?if the defragger did it every time you defragged your drive it might ?mean that some measly 1MB chunk has to be opened up on the disk for a ?file near the beginning of the disk which means, perhaps a huge chunk ?of other contiguous files have to be move. And don’t forget that you ?might have a number of files that have to be treated that way.
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So, after pass 1, you have scattered about your drive, relatively ?contiguous chunks of files. Hence pass 2 to assemble the scattered ?pieces together in whatever order they get picked up, then defragged, ?then consolidated again.
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So on. I have seen my disk defragmenter go up to 8 passes though the ?last few may zoom past.
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So I suppose that the multiple passes is an attempt to get reasonable ?performance out of an action that is supposed to be low priority ?compared to one’s actively using the computer.