Question: I work with real-time video apps, and just defragged my (Win XP) system to try to improve the general performance. It did… but it appears to have destroyed the generally contiguous nature of certain test folders filled with tens of thousands of sequential images.
Is there any utility that can make the contents of a particular folder as contiguous as possible on the disk so that the disk access time is minimised when reading files in that folder? That is… a folder-level defrag rather than a file-level one?
Answer: MyDefrag is free and offers a scripting language, and optimizing (reordering) by path; “System Disk Monthly” ?and “Data Disk Monthly” do this. Best part: you can edit those scripts and make your own; note the “zone” functionality, etc. ?http://www.mydefrag.com/Manual-Scripts.html
Consider, if you didn’t know already: disk access at the outer edge of the platter (logical start of the drive) is significantly faster than at the end (inner edge.)
Lastly: think about what your time is worth, and consider an SSD if random IO is really important; these days prices are getting pretty reasonable, approaching that of 10k RPM drives. ?If you do get an SSD and need the very highest IOPS, some benchmarks done by hardware review sites have shown that SATA interface speed has a significant impact on IOPS.