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Re:Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM by mgaunard on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @01:24AM (#32746684)
If you read data to an arbitrary position in a file, you first need to figure out in which block(s) that data is located.

If the file is fragmented, this may require more reads than if it's contiguous and uses an extent.

Exact scheme is filesystem-specific.

Re:Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM by antod on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @05:23PM (#32757137)
Yeah, that was one of the reasons I said "just about". But minuscule compared to millisecond seek latencies on a spinning disk.

So the problem getting orders of magnitude smaller while the costs of the cure increasing a lot swung the equation away from defragging being a good thing overall.