Trent W. Buck wrote:
..........snip
If you're asking "why are we wasting code even having this feature",
No, the question I think I am asking is, is it really necessary to fragment the file during writing, in the first place? Then efficient use of disk space just amounts to defragmenting the free space; ie arranging the files contiguously. I don't doubt your contention that FAT is particularly evil in this respect; or that defragmentation is quite simple in ext or automatic in btrfs and zf..
consider copying a DVD to a disk with 1TB free, but no contiguous free segment exceeding 4GB. Should the user just be told "just buy a bigger disk, they're really cheap"? That seems ludicrous to me. On second thought; I am not even convinced that 'non-fragmented' writes implies any more than a temporary loss of space. Can't the OS just write the 4GB DVD to RAM till the FS makes the free-space contiguous ? But on the subject of economy , we already accept a trade-off between disk space utilisation and speed of access etc.; it seems to be widely accepted that once a disk gets down to about 20% free-space, it is time to get a bigger drive ?
regards Rohan McLeod