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possible Hard Drive failure


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#1
Oblivionon360

Oblivionon360

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When i run a Disk Defragment, about half of te bar at the end is in red, meaning Fragmented files. I was just wondering if this was a sign of a soon hard drive failure. And yes this is after the Defragment is complete that it is half red.
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#2
Neil Jones

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Files that show up red in the defragmenter are files that are fragmented.

In a nutshell, files on the hard drive are kept in what are essentially pigeon holes (they're actually called clusters), a chunk for each pigeon hole if you like. Fragmentation occurs when part of a file goes in one pigeon hole but another part goes in another pigeon hole somewhere else on the disk. Therefore when you defrag a drive all you're effectively doing is rearranging the contents of each pigeon hole so they're next to each other.

Files stay red on the screen typically because there isn't enough free space on the drive to rearrange the files. Defragmentation needs at least 15% free space, preferably more, in order to do a decent job, otherwise it's like trying to clean out the wardrobe without taking anything out of it. It is not necessarily a sign of a defective hard drive, the fact it won't defrag usually means there's too much stuff on it.
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#3
Oblivionon360

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Its a 60 gb hard drive with 12 gb partitioned for the OS. the other 47 gb is what I'm defragmenting and there is 21 gigs free it gets about 18% when it tells me some files could not be defragmented and i view the report and it does not show any files that could not be defragmented.
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