I recently purchased an SSD, and for a few reasons not worth going into I had to install Windows on a traditional HDD and make symbolic links so "Program Files" actually goes to my SSD.
I started going through the SSD tweaks guide, and realized that when the defragger tries to defrag my HDD it might accidentally defrag my SSD by following the symbolic links (if it first doesn't convert to an absolute path).
Is the Windows 7 defragger intelligent enough to check for this?
Answer
For a defagger to work, it has to have a reasonably detailed knowledge of the file system as you can't reliably de-fragment a file using file-system-independent APIs.
For example, a defragger for NTFS will normally use the unique/canonical MFT record ID instead of the arbitrary path and, as such, it will not even consider the symbolic link a "file".
Also, reparse points, junctions and symbolic link (variant) are included in NTFS as early as Windows NT 4 (for active directory support), so most defragmentation software should be aware of them now.
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