What is Free Space Consolidation (/X flag) in Disk Defragmenter on Windows 7?

Question

Windows 7 included the "/X" flag with the Disk Defragmenter program.
The CMD description says...
"/X - Perform free space consolidation on the specified volumes."

What exactly does that mean? I've searched all over and have been unable to get a straight answer.
The default task runs without the /X flag.

What does "defrag /C /X" do that "defrag /C" does not do?

Answer 1

Dominic, you are thinking of the -R and -W switches with the Vista deftag.exe program, which controls whether or not to defrag segments smaller than 64 MB. The default is -R, which won't defragment sections larger than 64 MB. Those switches don't exist in Win 7, or at least aren't in the documentation anymore, they may still work.

I'm not sure if it uses the same methodology though, but the switches that control it are no longer present. The article you reference doesn't say if that was kept in the Win 7 version, though I suspect they did, The -R and -W switches may still work, or -X may include -W now.



Defrag by itself just defragments the files. They can be spread all over the drive with lots of little free spaces in between.

/X will tell defrag to also defrag the free spaces, moving the files together at the start of the drive, so the free space is all in one chunk (as much as possible). This makes it easier to store new large files in one piece, and can let you shrink a volume more in some cases, assuming there are no unmovable files towards the end of the partition

Answer 2

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RE:

What is Free Space Consolidation (/X flag) in Disk Defragmenter on Windows 7?

Windows 7 included the "/X" flag with the Disk Defragmenter program.

The CMD description says...

"/X - Perform free space consolidation on the specified volumes."



What exactly does that mean? I've searched all over and have been unable to get a straight answer.

The...

Answer 3

Firstly, unmoveable files are critical system files, you dont delete them. They are the green lines in the fragmentation graph. Red lines indicate the fragmented files. (when Windows saves files, they are broken and stored in a non sequential manner across the drive, this is fragmentation) Blue are the non fragmented files. When fragmentation levels go very high, you will experience slowdown in opening files folders, programs etc as the drive takes more time to read these fragments. There is no way you can lose space doing a defrag.In fact running a defrag helps keep drives fast, improve performance and prevent premature drive problems. Run a diskcleanup before the defrag and you will free up more space.

Answer 4

Defrag Switches

Answer 5

Defrag doesn't consolidate fragments that are larger than 64 MB by default. Using the /x switch overrides this behavior and consolidates all fragments regardless of size.



You can read why it doesn't consolidate larger fragments in the blog post linked below.



Edit: Whoops, my mistake.



- Dominic