When I copied photos from my camera to my desktop, they have fragmented equally throughout the remainder of my hard drive. Why?

Question

A couple of days ago I copied 200 or so CR2 photos from my DSLR Canon EOS 1000D to a folder on my Desktop.

Today when I opened up my defrag program it shows that 1 or 2 images has been scattered in blocks almost equally throughout the remainder of my hard drive, as you can see at the bottom of the blocks in my screenshot. All that space was previously completely free.

That screenshot was taken after running a defrag.

I have two main questions:

1. Why have all these images been fragmented rather than copied into a single block?
2. Am I going to run into problems with large files if, even after defragmenting, the blocks remain as they are now?

Answer 1

There are two aspects of defragmentation:

• removing multiple fragments from files, so that each exists in a contiguous area of disc;
• removing the fragmentation of free space to give a single block of free space.

Unfortunately, most defragmenters make a reasonable job of doing the first of these, but in the process often make free space fragmentation worse. New files are created in the free space, so they occupy a fragmented area and become fragmented themselves, as you have observed.

I'm afraid I have not yet found a defragmenter that makes a good job of both. Note that it is impossible to have a completely defragmented free space block, because certain files are immovable, and they will inevitably have adjacent free space.