4 ms·
Disk fragmentation has not mattered for the last few years. Most modern hard drives are not storing data in the exact way that they are reporting to the softwar
by Tsagadai 15y ago
Disk fragmentation has not mattered for the last few years. Most modern hard drives are not storing data in the exact way that they are reporting to the software layer. Hardware manufacturers use all sorts of tricks to make their drives faster, many of these 'break' the original specifications for how these devices are meant to work.
- acqq 15y agoStill, if you write a piece of A a piece of B a piece of C then a piece of A then piece of B ( A B C A B C ) it's fully certain that you wont have on the disk AAA BBB CCC, whereas you can expect most of the file patterns to be AAA BBB CCC if you write from the queue. In the case of A B C A B C you need a disk seek when reading pieces of the file, in the case of AAA you don't. As long as there are mechanical hard disks (and they still have big advantages for a lot of uses) such things matter a lot. You can seek only 100 times per second! Just to compare, during time waited on one seek on 2 GHz machine you can do at least 20 millions of calculations...
- theatrus2 15y agoMechanical disks still exhibit differing beginning to end performance, they are still mostly linear. SSDs are of course completely different.