I have tried a few defrag programs, but I have never found one that allows the user to group files together by directory/folder. I ask this because I have an Excel program that gets all my mp3 files and lists them in a spreadsheet. I'm sure it would run quicker (it takes about five minutes now) if my mp3 files were grouped together. They are on a hard disk drive rather than an SSD. SSDs in the 4 TB region are still pretty expensive.
Edit:
File system is NTSF
OS is Windows 7 x64
Defrag programs I've used: Norton, Raxco's PerfectDisk, Defraggler that comes with CCleaner, of course Window's built-in defrag, and one other I can't recall the name of (QDisk?).
None of them gave the option of grouping files by directory/folder.
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For what filesystem? NTFS I guess?– Nicolas Raoul ♦Commented Feb 8, 2016 at 7:17
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Why would it matter where the files are? You won't be accessing them, just the File Allocation Table to get their names.– MawgCommented Feb 9, 2016 at 10:52
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I strongly suspect that Excel is your bottleneck here. It is not designed to access files. I guess that you are using a VBA macro, which will be interpreted and that a compiled program would be much faster. There are many MP3 catalog programs out there. Perhaps, if you tell us the features that you want, we could recommend one.– MawgCommented Feb 9, 2016 at 12:45
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1@Mawg, this get complicated...I have several sheets in my workbook. The first sheet gets and lists all the mp3 files in my music folder and its subdirectories; there are just over 9,100 mp3 files. On the 2nd sheet I copy the songs from sheet1 that I want on my thumb drive; it has index/match formulas that get the full path. I then have another sheet that lists all the songs, which is written to via a macro. That sheet also has another macro that writes the batch file that I use to copy the files from the drive to the thumb drive. I could probably use iTunes, but I find it cumbersome.– BillDOeCommented Feb 9, 2016 at 19:51
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Thanks for the explanation (+1)> But, lolx! You start "this get complicated" and end "I could probably use iTunes, but I find it cumbersome" :-) All that I can suggest is to try out a few ITunes competitors. Or, if you can code, code as much as you can in a some compilable language and call that from a VBA stub.– MawgCommented Feb 9, 2016 at 19:57
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1 Answer
UltimateDefrag (Paid, 30 days trial)
This utility, aside from doing regular file consolidation, it able to reorder the files in disk. In particular, it allows you to specify what files and folders you want to move to the outer tracks of the disk (which are the ones that gives better performance).
You may also tell it to consolidate folders troghout the whole disk, or to sort them by last usage (placing those that have been used more recently in the outer tracks).
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to you have any personal experience with this program, or is it just one you're aware of? (+1 for the answer).– BillDOeCommented Apr 18, 2017 at 0:04
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@BillOertell I have used it. It is the only one I am aware of that can rearrange files. I suggest getting the last version (it is faster, and I had some issues with version 4 that I will not go into). Advice: set it to not move large consolidated files. If you only need to arrange a few folders, you can do it on the trial version with no problem. For sorting the full disk, I would advice to buy a license (because it takes too long, you probably want to split the work in multiple sessions, and your 30 days might be over before you finish... depending how big the disk is, of course).– TheraotCommented Apr 18, 2017 at 6:03
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thanks. I'm going to go ahead and mark this as answered. I see from your link that the current version is 5. You say you had problems with version 4; does that mean you prefer version 3 over version 4, or version 5 over version 4?– BillDOeCommented Apr 18, 2017 at 23:14
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@BillOertell version 4 was the first one I used, never used version 3 so I can't really speak of how it works. Judging by the published fixes in version 4 (a crash condition and wrong handling of the MFT) I would suggest to not go back.– TheraotCommented Apr 19, 2017 at 1:06
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I downloaded the program and ran it today. It took about six hours to organize and defrag a 6 GB HDD with almost a TB of data on it. The Excel macro that gets all my MP3 files used to take about seven minutes to run. After the defrag it took five.– BillDOeCommented Apr 20, 2017 at 1:19