Its frequently required to move data between drives for better organization, which at times involves resizing, deleting and combining partitions. There is an old known problem for which I never managed to find a solution and simply avoided. Its easy to resize (make bigger) a partition to the right, but when trying to resize to the left, any partitioning program I used so far required to move all data to the left as well - to the beginning of the resized partition.
This makes very little sense to me. When you look at any Defragmenter's work, they can move data around the partition in any direction, driven by their optimization algorithm (different for each). Again, looking at disk structure in Degragmenter, the File System data (MFT / MFT Zone) can be at any place around the disk, not nesessarely at its beginning. So why Partitioning tools can't do the same? Leave MFT and all other data where it is (at least on a user demand for non-bootable partitions), or move merely MBR & MFT to the beginning of a resized partition, but leave data (which takes a lot more space than MFT) untouched.
Its hard to comprehend the logic of moving 500Gb around the same partition, putting a hard drive to totally useless severe stress, loosing time, and risking to loose data along the way as the drive heats up. The problem was somewhat addressed in this thread on Gparted Forum, but without any solution, citing no objective reasons for lack of such feature apart from "extra programming required". Given how many people refrain from repartitioning and can't use disk space efficiently due to this very reason - to avoid senselessly moving huge amount of data to the left, the extra effort required appears well justified.
Hence a question: is there any free & non-free partitioning tool that allows to extend a partition to the LEFT without moving its data to the LEFT (except possibly boot or MFT related data)?
This makes very little sense to me. When you look at any Defragmenter's work, they can move data around the partition in any direction, driven by their optimization algorithm (different for each). Again, looking at disk structure in Degragmenter, the File System data (MFT / MFT Zone) can be at any place around the disk, not nesessarely at its beginning. So why Partitioning tools can't do the same? Leave MFT and all other data where it is (at least on a user demand for non-bootable partitions), or move merely MBR & MFT to the beginning of a resized partition, but leave data (which takes a lot more space than MFT) untouched.
Its hard to comprehend the logic of moving 500Gb around the same partition, putting a hard drive to totally useless severe stress, loosing time, and risking to loose data along the way as the drive heats up. The problem was somewhat addressed in this thread on Gparted Forum, but without any solution, citing no objective reasons for lack of such feature apart from "extra programming required". Given how many people refrain from repartitioning and can't use disk space efficiently due to this very reason - to avoid senselessly moving huge amount of data to the left, the extra effort required appears well justified.
Hence a question: is there any free & non-free partitioning tool that allows to extend a partition to the LEFT without moving its data to the LEFT (except possibly boot or MFT related data)?