[jazzbo]

Originally Posted by mfsljunkie

If you set up your hard drive into multiple partitions the next time you reformat, you might want to see if you could format the data partition as 'ext3' instead of 'FAT' or 'NTFS'. I've heard that Windows can read and write to ext3 partitions (if you download the proper freeware utility), but I don't know if there is a program that would allow Windows to format a partition as such.

If you could format a partition as ext3, it'd be well worth it--ext3 partitions are self-defragmenting.

I think if you run Windows this is a bad idea. As much as I like Linux and its filesystems, using something where you're need even freeware utilities to read it, means an extra layer of difficulty if Something Goes Wrong (whether it be some type of data loss, a crash -- anything that requires you to try and apply a disk recovery utility). Also as an external drive, there might be the need to pick it up and move it to another machine, something that becomes more difficult the fancier you get.

ext3 is better at avoiding fragmentation, but it will still fragment. And a blanket statement like 'self-defragmentating' is misleading. It looks for contiguous blocks in order to place flaces as part of the file allocation algorithms, and I've seen statistics that it begins to hit a effectiveness curve as the filesystem approaches 60-70% full.

It certainly does not however, actively defragment when free space becomes available and filesystems kept close to max often will be severely fragment even on ext3. Only if the files are moved manually will they defragment -- it is not something that the filesystem does itself.

Try running

e2fsck -nvf /dev/hda1

(subsitute your drive's device with the one listed here) and look at the value for non-contiguous inodes.

Whether UNIX like systems are hampered as much by fragmentation as Windows is a different issue, but suggesting a Windows user adopt ext3 won't reap those potential advantages either.