At 07:07 AM 2/12/2005 +1100, Alan McDonald wrote:

>and apart from what Ann recommends, with fast HDs of today and NTFS, defrag
>is nowhere near as effective as it was in the early days with slow HDs and
>FAT systems.
>It's effect is so marginal it's not really worth considering.

Are you kidding? A fraggy fast disk on NTFS is accessed faster than a
fraggy slow disk on FAT32 but it's still slowed by being fraggy. The
impact on files that have a low level of access might be insignificant but,
with a database file, disk fragmentation adds progressively more levels of
indirection over and above the internal indirections in effect *within* the
database file(s).

One thing I have observed with fraggy NTFS disks and the shipped defrag
utility is that you have to defrag it twice to get it done properly. At
least, that's the case on my Win2K systems, where the RAM isn't enormous.

./heLen