I have no idea whether or not this is a standard feature in other Unix systems, but it appears that there’s a very handy little “under-the-radar” feature in Mac OS X 10.3/Panther — automatic file defragmentation.
Everytime an application opens a file for reading, HFS+ checks if the file is fragmented and is less than 20MB in size. If so, it copies the file’s contents to a continuous region on the disk and frees up the previously allocated blocks.
What a wonderfully convenient feature. Even nicer, when someone asked if there were any official confirmation from Apple about the feature, someone else posted the source code from the Darwin (command-line only open source) version of the core system.
(via MacSlash)
CJ
Brandon
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This is a standard UNIX thing: you don’t worry about fragmentation on UNIX-based systems (those based on UFS or FFS). It’s generally in the 1-2% range.