This may have been asked but…
I'm trying to profile the impact of file fragmentation on one of our business applications. What's the easiest and cleanest way to cause a 20GB file to fragment into roughly (say) 35,000 pieces?
Ideally the distribution would be random throughout the disk and/or be directly reproducible as much as possible but those are secondary concerns. It wouldn't have to be the exact number of fragments either, but within a range of 2-3k fragments.
Naturally I wouldn't be working with live data, but I'd like to avoid anything which could cause wider file system problems (this would be on a production server during off-hours).
If there's no elegant way of doing this, I'm happy to explore the alternatives – e.g. creating thousands of files in multiple simultaneous processes, using perl or a c# console program.
Platform is Windows Server 2003. Not sure of the configuration of the physical disks but the disk space is split between
– 12GB OS partition
– 35GB page file partition
– 500GB "data" partition. (this has the file[s] I'm interested in)
Best Answer
You can download Defraggler to selectively Defragment the files and you can use MyFragmenter as described here to create new fragmented files.
As for fragmenting existing files, my best suggestion is to move the file off, generate tons of fragmented files with MyFragmenter and then copy the file back onto the drive. Due to the empty space being all fragmented, you'll get a fragmented copy.