What should I do with a badly fragmented disk? Defrag or copy to another drive?

Question

I've inherited a machine with a large, badly fragmented disk drive containing lots of files.

Defragging is very slow, and makes the drive seek a zillion times (you'd think enough to cause a meltdown).

Would it be faster (and less wear and tear) to

• pop in another physical volume,
• move as much as possible to that scratch volume,
• defrag the now-nearly-empty original volume,
• then move everything back?

If so, is there some rule of thumb by which to predict when it's faster to recopy instead of defragging?

Answer 1

I dont know the answer, but I would guess it would take approximately the same amount of time. You would be performing the same amount of seeking, reading, and writing. Its just the writing would be to a different disk on the first pass. The only thing I would think that might be an improvement is that is that if the original disk has almost no space left, a defrag wouldnt have the optimal space to run.