How to move a directory inside a drive (physically)?

Hello everybody,
It's my first message here.
My problem is to move a directory to the front section of the drive.
Like defragging, but to place the directory in the front so it reads faster as well.

I could not find a utility that does it. I remember of an old defrag program but can't recall. Thank you, a very nice atmosphere here.

 

:major Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
I'm not sure that moving a file/folder/directory to the front of the HD will make any difference in how fast that info is accessed. Keeping the info defragged will increase access speed however. There are some apps that allow for custom file/folder defrags; check the Drive Utilites section here at MajorGeeks. I use Auslogics which goes thru each file and defrags the files that need it and it does it fast, and it's free.

 

Thanks, the defraggers help but to move a certain folder to the front, they don't count. I checked every defragger (almost everything).

I have a 250gb partition that extends to the end of the drive. I'm trying to move lightroom catalog folder (a folder includes many files, lightroom counts on catalog) to the front so i can get some performance gain. Thanks again.

 

I don't know anyhting about 'lightroom catalog' but if you set the windows indexing service at the app it should speed it up once the index has been created.

What is 'lightroom catalog'?

there just happens to be a picture of the box to tick on post 15 of this thread.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=142123

 

No, It's actually not a matter of the catalog. Catalog is just a folder with many files.

The matter is how to carry a complete folder (I mean the files of a folder for sure) to the first clusters of a drive. Thank you anyway

 

How can one define "the front section" of a drive?

There are multiple platters rotating at fairly high speed, and typical access time is on the order of a handful of milliseconds. You may just as well try to position program code at "the front" of memory.

It will make no perceptible difference. In fact, if you're running Windows, you would likely be better off if you could locate the physical location of the Windows swap file and put your folder there, if you want to save a few microsoeconds. Of course that all falls apart if you have inefficient antivirus software and its DLLs are located elsewhere on the drive. Sometimes not all required modules fit into available memory, so they load and unload as needed.

I submit that the "fastest" place would be the "data" center, because statistically, there would be less travel time to move to that location than any other, because the heads could be at any location - especially on a full disk.

If you are experiencing latency from the time you start the operation until the time it loads, I can assure you that the physical location on the disk is not the problem. Try increasing the size of the Windows swap space, assuming you have enough free disk space to do so. And if the disk is too full, then it's time to add another drive and move less-often or less-critical data on to the new drive.

 

The front of the drive is the place where you have the highest linear speed. You have the best linear speed on the edges on a rotating disk. So by placing files on the edges you have better read/write speed. But because a HDD has many disks on it I'm not sure if this always comes true.

My idea comes from an old defrag program, it was moving the pagefile to the front of the drive so that read/write gets faster. It also had the option of moving specific folders to the front as well. It might be some old version of diskeeper, I don't remember.

Because I'm not losing anything, I want to give it a try:major. But I guess nobody knows about it.

 

Try this ......

http://disktrix.com/

Ultimate Defrag

 

Thank you very Much!!

 

Youre Welcome ...

I do believe they are giving 7 day free trials right now .......

http://www.disktrix.com/

 

>> ..where you have the highest linear speed..
Well, I humbly eat my words, as I had no idea that the bit rate for the outer zones was so much higher. And thanks for posting this topic, else I would not have read up on the matter.

Given that the bit rate IS that much higher, wouldn't it then make more sense on a Windows system to keep the swap file out there? Seems like system performance would be better that way.