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I'm trying to shrink a fat32 primary partition from 500GB to 450GB in order to get 50GB unallocated space before the partition. The external disk has approx. 380GB data in it and connected via usb 2.0. The operation has been going on for nearly 24 hrs and the progress bar is at 10%. Task manager shows 80% memory usage, and Paragon Hard Disk manager is running. The external hdd has its led flashing, but on my laptop the disk usage led is hardly doing so. Conf.: [email protected], 2Gb ram, external drive: Lacie P'9220, Win7 prof. x86

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  • This is unusually slow. It should really take 10-20 hours. I would recommend checking your hard drive utilization.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Oct 6, 2015 at 9:40

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You're actually doing two major operations at once.

  1. Shrink a partition.
  2. Move a partition.

Shrinking can be a lot of work if there currently is data in the excluded part of the partition. Keep in mind that your data is likely to be fragmented over the whole partition. All data in the 50 GB part has to be moved to empty sectors of the partition.

The next step is moving the whole partition by 50 GB to the end of the disc. So all data inside the partition has to be moved.

The problem with moving data while doing this kind of operation is that you don't have any buffer specified. Thus the software is using your memory. Loading data into RAM and writing it back to disk. This happens for both operations.

It might be possible that Paragon is migrating both operations which saves moving of data for the shrinking.

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  • But 24 hrs - 10%? I cannot beieve that such operation should last ten days..
    – anghra
    Oct 6, 2015 at 10:38
  • @anghra - You are correct. Even with the reduced speed of USB 2.0 the fact it has made so little progress after 24 hours indicates an I/O problem. In other words its extremely likely your HDD is having problems writing the data to the new sectors, or to put it simply, your HDD is starting to fail.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 6, 2015 at 11:56
  • @Ramhound Keep in mind that all the data has to be read and written. With USB 2.0 I would expect about 25 MB/s max speed for read operations and about 15 MB/s for write operations. Guessing the partition is moved block wise, we have about 500 GB to read and 500 GB to write.
    – sbecker
    Oct 6, 2015 at 12:21
  • @sbecker - I have read and written ( in other words cloned ) 2 TB drives in around 3 days. Given the current progress there is something else going on.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 6, 2015 at 13:28

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