[Gllug] ntfs defrag

[Martin A. Brooks]

Dylan wrote:
> If it's the latter then the short answer is: you 
> don't need them because the filesystems are more efficient in the first 
> place.

Not quite true, and it depends on exactly which filesystems you're 
talking about.  You are _probably_ refering to ext2 or ext3 in which 
case, to a large extent, fragmentation is reduced by attempting to 
allocate space for a file in contiguous blocks, or blocks that are as 
close together as possible.   The efficiency tends to reduce once the 
disk reaches a certain percentage of its capacity, the typical figure 
bandied about is 80% and I have no scientific data to back this up.

Other filesystems do worse and better.  XFS does better (delayed 
allocation strategy), FAT32 (a perfectly reasonable of filesystem for 
certain uses) generally does worse.



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