* Ray Kloss <raykloss_at_mac.com> on Sun, 26 Aug 2001
| There, it says it all.
Yes, they do.
No, defragmenting them is not all that useful. The primary reason for
defragmenting physical rotating media is to improve seek times. If data
being read is contiguous then the read heads do not need to move as much as
they would with discontiguous data. The reason FAT filesystems need to be
defragmented regularly is because the allocation algorithm was designed for
150K diskettes, and it does not scale at all. Other filesystems, like JFS
and EXT2, rarely need to be defragmented, if ever.
Solid state media has effectively zero seek time no matter how badly
fragmented the data might be. There are potential issues with block reads,
but the delays are microseconds or even nanoseconds. This is negligible
compared to the millisecond seek times of rotating media for all but real
time systems (which Newton is not).
-- Rat <ratinox_at_peorth.gweep.net> \ When not in use, Happy Fun Ball should be Minion of Nathan - Nathan says Hi! \ returned to its special container and PGP Key: at a key server near you! \ kept under refrigeration.-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Sep 09 2001 - 19:47:47 EDT