Philipp Thomas wrote:
On Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:32:17 -0500, James Knott wrote:
I have often had to defrag NTFS partitions. The defrag tool will even show you how fragmented things are.
That will tell you nothing! For goodness sake read the wikipedia article I quoted and you'll see why that tool isn't telling the whole truth and why defragging on a modern filesystem (and NTFS *is* one) seldom buys you much.
Philipp
You mean stuff like this? "NTFS: Windows 2000 and newer include a defragmentation tool based on Diskeeper. NT 4 and below do not have built-in defragmentation utilities. Unfortunately the integrated defragger does not consolidate free space. Thus a heavily fragmented drive with many small files may still have no large consecutive free space after defragmentation. So any new large file will instantly be split into small fragments with immediate impact on performance. This can happen even if the overall disk usage is less than 60%[9]" or "In any case, these limitations of defragmentation have led to design decisions in modern operating systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system like Windows Vista http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista to automatically defragment in a background process but not to attempt to completely defragment a volume because doing so would only produce negligible performance gains.^[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation#_note-6" It seems to be that if Vista automagically defrags in the backround, there's still some fragmentation occuring on NTFS partitions. I used OS/2 & HPFS, for many years and also provided 3rd level OS/2 support at IBM Canada. One thing I recall was that a bit map of disk space was maintained, so that the smallest piece of free space that could hold the file, plus a bit extra would be used. This method would resist fragmenting, so long as a reasonable amount of free space was available. -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org