Sorry I was rushed earlier and so made the terse response.
While NTFS needs a bit less defragging than FAT or VFAT, that by no means it doesn't need it.
Also, a fragmented disk, as one of our list members discovered, is more likely to have rather catastrophic results when resizing its partition--it is far more likely to fail and take your data with it.
It is still true, too, that fragmented files exercise the hard disk far more, leading to premature failure and less performance.
The only Windows file systems that should not be defragged are on solid state disks, where performance differences are generally unmeasurable and where you don't want to do too many write operations and reduce the life of an expensive disk.
At the present rate of progress with SSDs, I'll probably put one in my laptop by next Summer. Meanwhile, I do defrag the NTFS partitions on this drive occasionally--I have one for my Windows 7 dual boot and one data partition I wanted to read from both OS--Linux and Windoes--so it is also NTFS. However, both are used seldom enough that I don't bother to defrag more than once a quarter or so. Were I using them daily, I'd still be defragging probably once or twice a month at most.
David
--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "Paul" <pfrederick1@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "dbneeley" <dbneeley@> wrote:
> >
> >
> > --- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "Paul" <pfrederick1@> wrote:
> >
> > > I heard that NTFS did not need to be defragmented like vfat did, and the only reason Microsoft still ships defrag is because people ask for it, not because you actually need it.
> >
> > You heard wrong.
> >
> > David
> >
>
> Apparently I am not the only one. This was exactly what I heard from about the same time frame too:
>
> "The superior disk management capabilities of NTFS mean that fragmentation is reduced compared to FAT. Unfortunately, this led to a popular myth--that NTFS volumes have no fragmentation, and therefore never need defragmentation. Microsoft unwittingly exacerbated this problem by not providing any utility to defragment NTFS partitions in Windows NT, implying that defragmentation was unnecessary."
>
> From:
> http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/relFrag-c.html
>
> Technically it is TRUE in my case being as I've NEVER defragmented an NTFS partition in my life and I have not suffered in any way. But then again I don't do Windows and that might have something to do with it ...
>
> Shame Microsoft still has a negative impact on my life anyways though. Thanks Dave.
>
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