Macrium reflect users - best route to upgrade disks sans fragmentation

So its tax time. Im finally upgrading all 9 of my disks and joining the 100tb club.

However im trying to be proactive so it doenst take the rest of my life to migrate data, adjust paths, and get on with things.

Im a macrium user but so far its simply been backing up an OS image on a schedule. Im now wondering if its going to be my best route to migrate this data.

its my understanding that an image will remove all fragmentation. But i dont have the space to image a current 8tb hard drive to restore it somewhere else.

its said that cloning a disk does a 1:1 including said fragmentation. I'd like to remove the fragmentation as these drives are so huge and packed that running a defrag the conventional way would take much longer than is reasonable, if it would ever finish tbh.

I figured now would be the time. A quick google indicates that some programs allow cloning with, or without fragmentation included so to speak. A further google and this didnt seem to be the case with macrium (best i could tell).

So TLDR, how can i migrate this data without the fragmentation coming along for the ride? It seems a copy n paste/drag n drop will remove fragments, but apparently it can screw up permissions and while several of the drives (plex media) i dont forsee this presenting any issue, some others that I run things off of, it may. I'll pass on the unforseen nightmares that could create.

It might help to know more about the disk drive, both the old and the new. And about their interfaces.

its a mix of internal and external usb3. most of them are internal sata drives. All 4-8tb drives, will be swapping to the exact same drives/interfaces but 10-12tb.

Plan on doing it one drive at a time via a usb 3 dock. and sticking the new drive in the dock and opening macrium and cloning would be the easy way, but also the way that copies all my fragmentation with it.

klepp0906 said:

its my understanding that an image will remove all fragmentation...

A widely held misconception. A Macrium image actually preserves the sector layout, even when intelligent sector copy is selected. By default when restoring a partition it will be restored exactly as it was when it was imaged, including any fragmentation. You can force Macrium to defragment on the fly during a restore, but ONLY if you shrink the partition as part of the restore. The defragmentation on the fly can add significantly to the time taken for the restore, which is why the default is not to defragment.

This post, and the ones following it, discussed this. Included are quotes from a Macrium support engineer and tests by myself and other members who tested the Macrium restore both with and without resizing partitions.

Do I need to defrag the hard disk even if I format the hard disk - post #7

Bree said:

A widely held misconception. A Macrium image actually preserves the sector layout, even when intelligent sector copy is selected. By default when restoring a partition it will be restored exactly as it was when it was imaged, including any fragmentation. You can force Macrium to defragment on the fly during a restore, but ONLY if you shrink the partition as part of the restore. The defragmentation on the fly can add significantly to the time taken for the restore, which is why the default is not to defragment.

This post, and the ones following it, discussed this. Included are quotes from a Macrium support engineer and tests by myself and other members who tested the Macrium restore both with and without resizing partitions.

Do I need to defrag the hard disk even if I format the hard disk - post #7

So is my only option then, going to be a drag and drop or perhaps a different software? I cant in good conscience migrate all the fragmentation seeing as theyve literally never been defragged, and the new drives are going to cost a fortune. I'd like to benefit as much as possible for as long as possible beyond just the capacity upgrade :P

thank you for the link/info

Hi folks

@klepp0906

I've NEVER bothered defragging HDD's since way back to Windows 3.11 days -- the way modern I/O works - especially on 64 bit Windows is that Disk I/O is overlapped with other processes -- a "Prefetch" algorithm (quite sophisticated piece of A.I - Artificial Intelligence") builds up after a while the sort of typical tasks you do on a computer and can "Guess" what data you might need next -- so while there's no I/O activity hapenning e.g you could be entering data via a keyboard -- the computer reads in the blocks of data it thinks you will need (usually the guesses are quite reasonable) and stores it either in the paging area or in spare memory -- so when its needed the data is very quickly acessible.

Modern SATA drives are quite fast enough NEVER to need defragging however the files are split over the drive. SSD's of course having no moving parts don't obviously benefit at all from defragging as any address on the disk is equivalent to any other -- no mechanical movement of any kind is required.

People should get a little less "Geeky" about defrag stuff, and understand the basis of how any modern OS basically works whether Windows, Linux, Android or whatever -- the physical I/O is always the slowest part of the OS so optimising this to run while CPU is available is the way they all work --so these days TOTALLY FORGET DEFRAGGING and study up on OS principles 101 !!!!.

If the HDD's are slow nothing will make them better -- it's always good to have the OS on its own partition on an SSD -- also when you buy Spinners (i.e Classical HDD's) look for those preferably with 7200 -> 10.000 RPM and WITH LARGEST CACHE SIZE POSSIBLE. That makes a huge difference compared with a slowish 5400 RPM HDD with a tiny cache.

Cheers
jimbo