>>Hey Jim. Your four points seem, to me, to make the argument that fragmentation doesn't matter *as much* anymore because of system performance enhancements. But I am not sure that any of them negate the ol' "axiom"... in other words, I'd agree that the speed of modern systems just pushes off the manifestation of these issues until the disk is *really* fragmented (I am the first to admit I have not quantitative definition of "really" for that), or until you run some sort of process -- grabbing values from disk while in a long loop, for instance -- that really highlights the issue. But I'd imagine that there is still some effect.
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>OK, let me try "why are contiguous files considered so good" as compared to fragmented files. Again, keeping the points initially listed in mind.
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>It seems to me that in either a system with even a few concurrent processes underway (each using HD for user and temp files) or even a system running only a database application (using many tables, many of them largish), that contiguous files cause greater head movement (slowness) compared to the same files being fragmented (amongst each other).
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>Any new thoughts?
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Well, pretty much the same ol' thoughts... <bg>. I just read your original Chatter post, and the reply above, but I am not sure I get your point that the fragmentation could be more likely to put two points of a file closer together. I'm sure it's possible, but I don't think it's more likely....

Sure, if you need to jump from point A-->Z in a file (let's say that it's a large file represented by mgs of info represented alphabetically) then that's a big jump. And, in a contiguous file you are guaranteeing a 25-item jump; while in a fragmented file, Z could end up being closer than 25-items to A. But, there's no guarantee it will end up closer, and it could end up further apart. More importantly, it's rare that you jump from A-->Z. More commonly, you run through many pieces of data that are meant to be read contiguously... such as pages of a document or lines of a text file or bits of data in a database record.

On a really quick system you're unlikely to notice an impact during standard user-driven use, but if a user-macro or a loop construct comes into play, at some point the very small differences add up... a .1 second increase over ten thousand hits comes out to... well, it adds up!

(Am I following you correctly on this?)