ntfs defrag

[tomyrush]

I haven't used FAT ever since NTFS came out and as I remember the defrag on FAT showed an immediate and significant performance increase after a defrag.

I continue to do NTFS defrags on approximately a quarterly basis. After the dfrags, I can't seem to see any performance improvement. Itried to read the NTFS section on Wikipedia, but gave up after a while. I was specifically trying to see if defrags would get any performance improvement. I have to admit - in the reading I've done, I still have not been able to get a mental picture of the file structure.

Does anyone know if NTFS defrags are necessary?

Thanks
Tom

[HansV]

This is one of those subjects on which opinions differ wildly (and discussions may get heated).

NTFS suffers much less from fragmentation than FAT. My impression is that with today's large hard disks and fast processors, defragmenting the hard disk generally doesn't have a really big impact on performance.

Windows Vista and 7 by default defragment the hard disk(s) once a week; that should be more than sufficient; once a month would probably be OK too.

[tomyrush]

Thank you Hans - this is what I expected, but didn't know for sure

Tom

[John Gray]

Maybe this Microsoft blog will be better than Wikipedia?

Also note that "Unlike the Windows XP defragmentation tool however, [the Vista and Windows 7 Defragmenting tool] will only defragment files with fragments smaller than 64 MB on NTFS file systems."

[tomyrush]

that makes sense

Thanks
Tom