Joe Sloan wrote:
Not really. NTFS is rather fragmentation resistent. It's only FAT and its decendants that lacks considerably.
That's what some have said - and yet I see all my ntfs-using friends doing their weekly defrag. What is one to believe?
At work, I have two XP-Pro workstations at my desk, and support more of them in other parts of the office. I'm of the belief that an NTFS partition doesn't need to be defragged *often*, however I do so once a month, along with other routine tasks like security updates, in the name of preventative maintenance. Each month, each machine shows significant evidence of fragmentation (red bars in the graphical display), and after defragmentation everything is blue (contiguous) or green (can't be processed). I can't swear that the fragmentation actually has any measurable effect on performance, or if so, how much, because I don't wait for it to become a problem. I just know that significant fragmentation *occurs* within that time. By the way, this thread caused me to research installable file systems, and I came across an IFS driver that allows Windows machines to read and write EXT2 and EXT3 partitions. It interests me, because one of my Linux machines dual boots with XP-Pro, and I thought it might also be of interest to others here: http://www.fs-driver.org/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org