Defragging drives

[MajorFoley]

So got about a full HDD and i thought about doing a defrag to get some space back, is there a certain amount of free space needed on that drive to perform a defrag? Using a win7 OS and when i checked its not automatically scheduled to run one for the disk.

[Sakkura]

Defragmenting does not create any more empty space. It just rearranges all files to be contiguous on the disk, instead of fragmented.

[MajorFoley]

4 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Defragmenting does not create any more empty space. It just rearranges all files to be contiguous on the disk, instead of fragmented.

Right it would still make things run a little faster though right? And thats kind of why im asking if its moving files around as it does should i have a certain minimum amount of space before running it.

[Sakkura]

I don't think you need any space free, though it will probably defrag a lot faster if there's some room to work with. The defrag program can still just keep chunks of data in RAM as it's shuffling things around.

[MajorFoley]

5 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

I don't think you need any space free, though it will probably defrag a lot faster if there's some room to work with. The defrag program can still just keep chunks of data in RAM as it's shuffling things around.

Hmmm thanks.

[mmk]

Run Disk Cleanup to get rid of any temp and/or unnecessary files to clear up some space before you defrag.

[MajorFoley]

1 minute ago, mmk said:

Run Disk Cleanup to get rid of any temp and/or unnecessary files to clear up some space before you defrag.

HDD isn't my OS drive didnt think a data HDD drive would store temp files.

[mmk]

1 minute ago, MajorFoley said:

HDD isn't my OS drive didnt think a data HDD drive would store temp files.

Thought you were talking about your main drive, but you can try it on the data drive, won't hurt anything.

[MajorFoley]

Yeah thanks for the answers guys.