Re: [luv-talk] File fragmentation and waste disk space

Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:

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.

It does, but that's surely where the performance deficit lies, incurred whenever defragmentation is required. To make the case, you would have to show that having contiguously allocated files outweighs the cost of performing the defragmentation. This is most obviously so if the files are written once, never modified, and read often, but clearly, most file system usage doesn't follow that pattern.