Re: Question about fragmentation and moving folders . . .

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"Stan Shankman" <stantheman@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:u4kPjn2aGHA.3812@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Greetings all,

If I wish to move a bunch of folders from one drive to another, I cut them
and paste them over to the new drive. The move starts up as indicated by
the
"Move Progress" window. Now, if I should discover that I did not include
all
of the folders I wished to move, I can go ahead and cut the additional
ones,
and move them too. So now, I have two "Move Progress" windows open - both
depositing files on the same drive.

My question is: Will this cause fragmentation?
How exactly will NTFS handle this situation?

Intuitively, one might suspect that it would cause fragmentation, but at
the
same time it is conceivable that it would not. Short of conducting
experiments, I'm not sure how to go about finding the answer.

Thanks all,

- Stan Shankman


Copying files in two separate processes can indeed cause
fragmentation. However, you would not notice any difference
in performance. While it seems to appeal to some people to have
a nicely defragged partition, in most cases you would have to
use a stopwatch to notice any difference in speed, so why worry?
(I'm now bracing myself for the backlash from the defragging
brigade. They defrag religiously every week, they never use
a stopwatch to gauge the effect of their frequent defragging
and they tend to be dogmatic about their habits.)

NTFS, same as other file systems, can easily cope with fragmented
files. It does not care in the least where on the disk it finds the
bits and pieces belonging to a file, same as your brain does not
care where it stores the street map of your town. It's probably
all over the place!


.

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