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  • Very interesting. I assumed all the inode tables etc. were at the start of the volume. Commented May 18, 2015 at 3:02
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    @EmmaV distributing them across the disk, relatively close to the data they refer to, results in shorter seeks and faster disk access :) Commented May 18, 2015 at 16:22
  • are you sure NTFS have such large number of fragments? It has a free space bitmap and a different allocation algorithm so it doesn't produce so many fragments as the FAT family Commented Mar 15, 2022 at 2:58
  • @phuclv, I haven't seen any evidence that they use a better allocation strategy. It isn't so much of an issue of the filesystem itself ( in other words, NTFS having an allocation bitmap doesn't matter ), but rather the allocation strategy Microsoft's filesystem drivers have always used is terrible. Rather than improve their allocation strategy, they just bought a defrag program from another developer that created it and bundled it with Windows and even set it to automatically run periodically by default these days. If you run it manually you can see how much fragmentation there is. Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 19:35
  • yes I used various defragmenters regularly since Windows 9x and even watch them running for hours. I have no need to care about them for years because NTFS also use extents like ext4 and never produces hundreds of fragments unless the disk is severely full and there's no space for the MFT to grow, in which case ext4 also has the same limimtation Commented Apr 1, 2022 at 1:33