In fairness NTFS does usually make fragmentation a non issue away from pathological cases¹, much like ext2/3/4² which didn't have defrag tools³ for a long time

In fairness NTFS does usually make fragmentation a non issue away from pathological cases¹, much like ext2/3/4² which didn't have defrag tools³ for a long time either. FAT12/FAT16/FAT32's earliest-free-block-no-matter-what allocation method⁴ trained people to believe that fragmentation is a universally rampant problem, but with a better designed allocation strategy it really isn't. ---- [1] for instance simultaneously growing files on near-full volumes [2] more so ext4 with delayed allocation turned on [3] at least not ones without attendant "are you really sure you want to use this on data you care about?" warnings [4] I wonder if anyone retrofitted a brighter heuristic into an implementation of these or exFAT. Could be a (not massively useful but) interesting learning exercise for a budding OS developer.