On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Johan Eliasson wrote:
Thinking about running a WinXP instance in VirtualBox on OpenSolaris, using a 20 GB harddisk-file. However, I am worried about fragmentation... with the constant reading/writing that WinXP does... will not the fragmentation of the hardrive-file in ZFS be humongus??
With the default block size of 128K bytes, the fragmentation can not possibly be "humungous". NTFS usually uses 4K or 8K block sizes and has a max of 64K. Unfortunately, if NTFS updates just one 4K block, zfs needs to COW a whole 128K block. If NTFS does sequential reads and writes and the NTFS filesystem is not fragmented, then whole sequential 128K blocks should be updated and zfs won't be terribly fragmented either. So defrag your NTFS regularly, but keep in mind that doing so will bloat any zfs snapshots.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
