On Sun, 04 Nov 2018 18:55:29 -0500, Paul wrote:

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.

Good info, but the last time I was in a position where I was running out
of disk space, Stacker was the hot ticket, later replaced (briefly) by
Microsoft's DoubleSpace utility.

Since then, I've managed to keep ahead of my storage needs by adding
ever larger drives.

--

Char Jackson