Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Monday 2008-01-21 at 14:48 -0500, James Knott wrote:
> '80s) defragging wasn't required. Here it is almost 20 years
later and > Windows still requires it.
Requires, requires... not really. It does benefit (greatly) from it,
though.
Well then, HPFS, EXT2 etc., work fine, without worrying about it.
Fragmentation resistant file systems have been around for a long time.
Why doesn't MS use one?
I know.
Isn't ntfs more resistant?
No, it still gets fragmented
I suppose FAT has outgrown its initial design usage for floppies and
small disks, and it has been a practical sucess, despite its
shorthcommings. It is not inherently a bad system, just... different.
Other systems were better designed.
Is not the ext2 design newer than fat? The fragmentation problem of fat
was known before linux was born.
I don't know when ext2 was invented, but other fragmentation resistant
file systems were around before NTFS. For example, HPFS, which was
actually created by MS, when they were doing OS/2 work for IBM, predates
NTFS by a few years.
There is another detail: IMO, fragmentation of fat occurs not because of
the format, but because of the way it is used. It would be the task of
the operating system to avoid fragmentation of the files, by writing
them properly, and even correcting them later on. The format allows for
that, but the operating system does not.
File systems, such as HPFS and ext2 try to resist fragmenting, by
storing a file in the smallest free space that will hold it and only
fragment if a big enough contiguous free space does not exist. This
means fragmentation is unlikely, until the drive is almost full. On the
other hand, FAT and (IIRC) NTFS simply grab the next available free
space, whether big enough or not and if necessary, additional blocks of
free space, until there's room for the file. This means that it might
save a file in multiple pieces, when it could have simply found a single
block that was large enough.
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