[Q] Where does all the space go?

Joseph D. Wagner theman at josephdwagner.info
Fri May 20 17:50:14 UTC 2005


> I found a post previously that claims it is required to prevent high
> levels of fragmentation as well as "other, very important" reasons. I
> wonder how accurate this statement is.

Very accurate.  Fragmentation increases exponentially.  The harder it is for the file system to find contiguous space for a file (as the file system gets more and more full) the exponentially worse fragmentation gets.  There's argument on exactly what the cut off point should be -- 90%, 95%, etc -- but by the time your TB file system is that full, you've got more serious problems anyway.

There's several studies on this out there on the web, somewhere.

Joseph D. Wagner





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