Defrag? Is it real?
Back in the old Unix and VMS (the Vax Operating system) we were always wondering about this funny defrag tools that DOS/Windows users used to use. On Unix and VMS systems you never had to do any defrag as a file system basically was a list of pointers and for that reason the actual location of the data on disk was fairly irrelevant.
Then we learned how FAT was built and realized the reasons and need to defrag the file system. Then came NT and NTFS and as you might remember the chief architect of NT was Dave Cutler, who was personally hired by Bill Gates to write a new operating systems. Now, this guy Dave Cutler is probably the only person on this planet that has written something like 6 to 7 different operating system, one of them the famous Vax-VMS. He certainly designed NT on the basis of his previous experience and make it better. As far as I remember people used to say that NTFS was basically a newer or a simplified version of the Vax-VMS file system.
So, theoretically defrag does not make much sense on a list of pointers. But as DOS/Windows users were used to defrag, some clever companies thought they could really make good business to continue with defrag. To our eyes and to our conscience it is certainly pleasing to see on screen how our files are properly ordered and structured, but I think the operating system does not really care about...
At least I have never noticed any significant degradation of the NTFS file system on a highly fragmented disk. So I would say defrag is a total waste of time!
Of course, I run defrag too on a regular basis, it is nice to know that your disks looks pretty cleaned up