Carlos Rodrigues wrote:
> And after 8 years using Linux all the time, I came to find the MS-land
> rituals somewhat exotic (if unix filesystems take care of themselves,
> why can't the so called New Technology File System?).
It can. NTFS is a dirivative of OS/2's HPFS. HPFS didn't have a defrag
worth mention either for much the same reasons as have been discussed here.
In fact in all my time running NTFS I've hardly ever thought to defrag. When
I have it was because of people coming from FAT habits trying to solve
unlreated problems (latest was City of Heroes server lagginess, go fig) and I
would defrag just to prove them wrong (No, really, disk "fragmentation" means
nothing to server-side lag, see!?). In each case the defragmentation took
forever and resulted in absolutely no perceptable improvement of performance.
> Most people don't actually know the specifics on why this is so, but
> know that their many-years-old filesystems don't turn slow just from
> using them.
Point in support of this statement. I've had hard drives physically fail
before my ext2/ext3 file systems have failed. While I am not pushing them as
hard as they would be pushed in a production environment they aren't lax,
either. ;)
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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