TABLE OF CONTENTS The Winternals team has developed a suite of disk tools that complement the utilities that already come standard with Windows. We are all familiar with the Disk Management Console available in Windows 2000 and subsequent versions; how to view drive properties; and how to use the disk defragmenting utility, Defrag. What many of us do not know is how to find extended information on all accessible volumes, what all of this new information means, and what to do with it.
In this chapter, you will learn a better way to manage disk and file fragmentation on your volumes, as well as advanced methods using the Winternals tool, Defrag Manager. You will also see exactly how and where your files are stored on disk, what the volume utilization really is, and what options you have for optimization. Finally, you will discover a treasure-trove of difficult-to-find information on your disk volumes that you thought never existed.
A hard disk comprises many plate-like, circular, magnetic recording surfaces called platters. These platters are stacked one above the other in a spindle. To provide an easy addressing scheme for space in a hard disk, each platter is divided into a number of concentric tracks. These tracks are divided further into smaller parts known as sectors. A sector is the smallest unit of space that a program can access in a hard disk. These sectors are usually 512 bytes in size. However, it is...
