On Sunday 17 February 2008 17:42, Philipp Thomas wrote:
On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:04:24 -0500, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
defragging took several hours for some NTFS partitions in the 40G - 60G range.
The interesting question would be if it brought any noticable speed-up.
And as with all issues of performance in modern IT systems, that is highly dependent on the pattern of access applied to the files in question. You can always come up with an access pattern that makes even a 100% contiguous file perform badly. And if the access is highly uncorrelated (random, roughly speaking), then fragmentation doesn't much matter. And if there's a great deal of processing involved in every sector, then high access overhead (i.e., fragmentation) wont' much matter. Only when one is performing highly correlated (sequential) access with little processing per sector does file fragmentation become a performance hit. And that pretty much characterizes file copying. I think we're not far away from ditching the whole abomination that is rotating magnetic storage in favor of purely solid-state mass storage. As with the extirpation of cables from the world of computing, I really, really look forward to this development! Mechanical devices (should) have NO PLACE in computing!!
Philipp
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