Defragment

[tmac]

Made a new partition with partion magic just to write finished projects to dvd files. I thought this would ensure that it would never need defragging as I delete these files as soon as I have written to disk. However Win XP shows a badly defragmented drive immediately after writing dvd files with Maestro. How can that happen when it was blank before writing them? I have three partitions, but my C drive rarely needs defragging though all my programs go on it.
Does anyone have an idea?

[theReal]

All I can do is guess, but if you write very large files to HD, they will almost always be fragmented a little bit - even if the file is only divided in one place and the rest of it is perfectly non-fragmented, software defragmenters will show the whole file as fragmented.

Partition Magic writes the clusters that are reserved for MFT in the middle of a partition (for whatever reason...) and a new file will be written after this section first. When it reaches the end of the partition it will be continued at the beginning and therefore be shown all red (=fragmented) in defragmenting software.

btw. you can see all this a lot better when using O&O Defrag instead of the WinXP defragmenter.