Warp wrote:
>   I'm really wondering why defragmenting an NTFS partition is so much faster
> than a FAT32 partition.

NTFS has a journal, do you don't have to fsync() every change on every moved 
block.  If you crash out during an NTFS defrag, the system can recover by 
simply taking a snapshot while you're working, and scanning the snapshot for 
used clusters not assigned to a file. Otherwise, moving a file is just a 
matter of copying the data, then stuffing the changed file structure blocks 
into the journal to be rolled out at leisure.

With FAT, every time you move a file, you have to rewrite both FAT tables 
and sync it out in order to insure the space is reserved before you update 
the directory, and then clear out the newly-freed space in the FAT table and 
sync that out again.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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