I'm with you.
It's strange that a newly formatted drive, would show such fragmentation, after being reloaded with files in the manner described.
I can only offer that maybe your software was not waiting for the each file to finish copying before starting the next. Those kind of overlapping copies could produce that result.
It would also thrash your cpu. Kind of like a denial of service attack.
If overlapping copies are taking place,
Process Monitor will show it.
As promised, I re-ran the procedure. The results this time are stranger than before.
It looks as though the about same amount (number of bytes) of the hard drive is fragmented, but this time "only" 40% of the files are fragmented. Whoopee, only 17,000 fragmented files instead of 34,000.
As Hugo suggested, the throughput on the backup was hugely improved by setting the Optimize for Performance flag, and probably turning off the virus checker helped a bit too.
I did watch the CPU activity with Task Manager the first time I did this, and it was thrashing, short duration spikes up to 95-100%, then back down to about 30%, then back up to 95%, every five seconds or so.
I suppose the next place to look is my backup software, a freeware program that I like called "Karen's Replicator". It has a simple UI and is not loaded down with features I don't need. Why does commercial backup software have to be so complex? Really, all I need to do is copy any files from the source drive that are either newer or not on the destination drive...
I'll try doing it again, this time from a c:> prompt using xcopy. I think that it will be a long process, though, because if I recall correctly the copying is much slower, probably to do with RAM caching or something.
tanstaafl.
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