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Windows Audio Problem (end of story)



On Sunday 16 May 2004 12:58, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Sun, 16 May 2004 11:41:03 -0400
>
> edwardp at operamail.com wrote:
> > People "in the know" have told me previously that a hard drive with
> > the NTFS file system does NOT have to be defragged.  Guess they
> > weren't too much "in the know"...  I ran the defrag utility under XP,
> > discovered that the XP partition was 45% fragmented and it recommended
> > a defrag.

> I could have told you that NTFS requires defrag. I used NTFS back when
> NT was beta when I was writing the Digital Alpha assembler for NT. I
> confirmed that they had not improved this when I was using Windows 2000.
> The issue may not be the filesystem per se. In contrast, Unix and Linux
> filesystems do not require defragmenting except in some extreme
> conditions. That is because Linux/Unix heavily buffer the files and the
> drivers make an attempt to prevent fragmentation.

Heavy fragmentation under Windows could also be attributable to the lack of a 
dedicated swap partition. Swap files apparently just get written anywhere 
that happens to be free space on a disk. Files that would be written with 
NTFS probably have to dodge wherever the swap happens to be at that moment. 
Anybody know details about how Windows uses swap? I'm just making a guess.
-- 
David Backeberg (dave at microway.com)
Microway Technical Support - http://www.microway.com

(508) 732-5542 Direct
(508) 746-7341 Main
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