Does NTFS Suffer from Fragmentation?

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The myth that NT and its file system NTFS do not fragment persisted for several years, causing people to believe that NT automatically selected the optimum position for files so as not to fragment them. Though NTFS did introduce better algorithms for cluster allocation, it quickly became evident that NT did fragment, and it fragmented considerably. Yet, for many years, Microsoft remained ambivalent about the impact of fragmentation on NT. Fortunately, there has been a change in stance over the past few years. In fact, the company now openly advocates regular defragmentation as a performance necessity and has included a "lite" defragmenter inside Windows 2000 and XP.

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