Disk fragmentation in the Windows file systems, whether it be the traditional FAT file system of Windows 3/95A, the FAT32 file system of Windows 95B/98, or the NTFS file system of all later versions of Windows, causes significant performance degradation. Executive Software is a Microsoft partner and the company that wrote the defragmentation code that's included in Windows. Here's what they have to say about Windows fragmentation:

"Disk fragmentation cuts directly across the integrity of your system. Files fragmented into 200 pieces take 200 times longer to access. Files shattered into 200,000 pieces will take 200,000 times longer, and so on... And, that's just one computer and one file!"

"The mathematics of a day's work on an entire network is staggering."

Executive Software sells a product called Diskeeper that can keep a NTFS file system constantly defragmented by running a defragmentation process in the background. Not only does Diskeeper have to defragment normal files on the disk, it also defragments the Paging (swap) file.

The ext3 file system, which is native to Linux, fragments very little because of the way the file system is designed. Fragmentation on a typical Linux disk is very low no matter how much file system activity occurs. With Linux, there is no expensive add-on defragmentation product to buy and no burden on machine resources to defragment the disks.

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