Let it frag?
Posted on January 3, 2006
I wanted to defrag my hard-drive today. But before I clicked on “Defrag” button I thought:
1 Clearly when file is fragmented, disk head need to travel all over the platter to reconstruct the file.
2 Yet when Windows defragmenter program compacts fragments, usually Windows runs slower.
In theory it should not be the case, but I believe that because it not only compacts the files, but also moves all files so that they are arranged continuously, all benefits from the defragmentation are lost.
You see then the Disk Defragmenter moves most often modified files to the outer side of the platter (for fast RW I/O) all the file fragments that are created after the defragmentation have to be written on the opposite side. Thus data access becomes very slow.
I don’t know how NTFS works, but if NTFS used hash like algorithm and defrager left some free space between (at least for the top 1/3) of the most modified files, that would have made defragmentation as it is more useful.
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