5/20/2023 0 Comments Disk fragmentation on macI defragment every 2-3 years, whether my box needs it or not. On a (large) system where the file system is spread across multiple drives a file can actually be accessed faster if it is “spread” as well, since multiple disks can be seeking the file simultaneously. Thus it can “pre-fetch” the next several (dozen) sectors.Īnd any more it’s often better to not have a file contiguous. Whereas DOS 1.x would have fetched each sector from disk as it was referenced, a modern OS is able to see that you have a file open for sequential access and can reasonably predict that you’ll be fetching additional sectors once you’ve consumed those you have now. Operating systems have gotten smarter as well. Plus sector sizes have gotten larger (or files are allocated in larger blocks) so that more data is inherently contiguous. ![]() Now you have very fast drives and large processor memories, and sometimes substantial buffering on the hard drive or in the controller. ![]() Back then you had hard drives that were scarcely faster than floppies, and processor memory sizes that were minuscule. Hicks fields the question:įragmentation is not the issue it was 30 years ago.
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