OSDev.org

I have never ever had a virus. Ever.

I'm running linux, so.....self explanatory. No viruses! Woo!

-JL

JamesM wrote:

..I can't say I've ever seen a drive slow down as a result of "being too full" though, that doesn't even make sense.

The drive itself wouldn't slow, but filesystem access times would increase because of heavy fragmentation and windows has been known to BSOD when it hasn't got enough swapspace...

Ah, Well.. Typically Unix file systems don't experience such heavy fragmentation, they're fairly well designed..

Any possible performance loss is negligible, I even get consistent read/write statistics 5 months after installation.

Brynet-Inc wrote:

JamesM wrote:

..I can't say I've ever seen a drive slow down as a result of "being too full" though, that doesn't even make sense.

The drive itself wouldn't slow, but filesystem access times would increase because of heavy fragmentation and windows has been known to BSOD when it hasn't got enough swapspace...

Ah, Well.. Typically Unix file systems don't experience such heavy fragmentation, they're fairly well designed..

Any possible performance loss is negligible, I even get consistent read/write statistics 5 months after installation.

I've not really had a slow down in I/O performance ever on Linux, on Windows I get it a lot. After a couple of weeks from installation, my Windows partition was fragmented quite a bit.

With regard to BSODing when out of swap space - that's what happened with my sister's box. What I've done now is move the pagefile out onto seperate partition, so her filling up the disk with crap she gets off the internet won't cause any more BSODing (unless she gets a virus, of course )

although many old-school pc people still advise defragging, tests have shown that XP running NTFS, with 80% fragmentation, defragging gives you, at most, 5% performance improvement (on pure-disk test, much lower on real-word simulations)

the reason you system runs slower when your disk is full, doesnt have anything to do with fragmentation, though it does have to do with swap-space -- when you have plenty, windows is better able to take advantage of it, while a full disk, means less swap-space, and therefore less efficient memory usage -- there are also other reasons as well

not sure all the technical reasons, but when your disk is full, simply emptying the recycle bin can provide a more significant performance improvement than defragging will