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[nate at portents.com]

> NTFS seems *extrmeely* sensitive to fragmentation even on
> fairly-high-performance drives which support NCQ, but Microsoft might
> just have screwed up royally.  Quite possible.

If you have to use Windows/NTFS, I highly recommend this program:

http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/

If you can make use of it's screensaver, I think it's a great way to keep
NTFS defragmented/optimized.

If you're wondering why NTFS needs to be defragmented so much, here's some
good info:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/

"NTFS works and works and is fragmented - even in the case of free space
is far from exhausting. This is promoted by the strange algorithm of
finding free space for file storage - second serious omission. The action
algorithm at any record is like this: some definite disk range is taken
and filled in with a file. It is done by the very interesting algorithm:
at first large unused space is filled in and then small one. I.e. the
typical allocation of file fragments according to the size on fragmented
NTFS looks so (sizes of fragments):
16 - 16 - 16 - 16 - 16 - [back] - 15 - 15 - 15 - [back] - 14 - 14 - 14....
1 - 1 - 1 -1 - 1...
So the process goes up to most small-sized unused space in 1 cluster, in
spite of the fact that on the disk there are also much larger pieces of
free space."

- Nate