Anyone recall that claim besides me.
Oh no, not only will NTFS not fragment, it cannot fragment… Yeah, that was being said not too long ago really…
I started thinking about that again when I ran an interesting little PC Pitstop program someone asked me about and it told me I was really fragmented… This on a machine that hasn’t been running but a couple of months and hasn’t had a lot of file churn (aka deletetioins with new adds)Â on it yet.
I Â look at the defrag tool and sure enough, fragmentation all over the place. Though the one that bothered me the most was the E: drive… ~7GB used out of ~48GB and it is all program files/utility tools and has never seen an uninstall or deletion and look at the level of fragmenting…
Â
Not only do I recall the claim but I drank the kool-aid. Dumb!!
Now at one of my jobs we are using diskeeper on all the machines and it’s run regularly.
I recall using that argument – NTFS 5.0 doesn’t fragment as much- as a selling point to internal stakeholders during our 2000 migration projects. It’s an improvement over NTFS 1.1 – but 5.0 doesn’t preclude having Diskeeper on my servers.
We have a large SMB customer base; so speaking of fragmentation – I wonder what other sysadmins use on workstations/clients? I had a VBscript that I tested out on some internal systems – but our user base has too many laptops for it to be really effective. By the time fragmentation usually becomes too painful to tollerate we wipe, and re-load from an image.
Any thoughts?
Honestly in most of the enterprises I have seen (all larger, generally 30k+ users), they ignore it completely, often even on the servers as well.