Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 04 Nov 2018 10:47:22 -0800, Gene Wirchenko
wrote:

I have never been able to detect any time difference between
before and after defragging so I no longer bother.

Same here. I stopped worrying about fragmentation somewhere around
2002-2003, in the early days of XP. By then, I had moved to bigger,
faster, drives, where fragmentation was no more than an academic issue.
Even before that, in the days of Norton Utilities in the 90's, I can't
say that I noticed a performance difference before versus after, but the
disk usage chart was a lot prettier after defragging. Everything was
packed nice and tight to the left, at least until the very next time I
did *anything*.


If you turn on NTFS compression for a whole partition
(the tick box in "Properties"), then around the 50GB-60GB
or so file size, you can run out of fragments to represent the file.
It's possible no matter how big the disk, to have a problem
with fragments.

But, it only happens with the crappy NTFS compression feature.

I don't regularly use compression, but I think it did hit
me once when trying to get a bit more mileage out of a
storage device.

Paul