Re: The only conspiracy @JoshOvki
MS and joint penguin head here.
NTFS is still pretty frag-happy as it's not extent-based like most "basic" *nix filesystems in use these days. (Advanced COW systems like ZFS or btrfs are another matter and can frag up worse than NTFS under the right workload/lack of maintenance regime)
Most enterprise systems will be running on a SAN so the fragmentation doesn't really matter so much, as the backend SAN usually figures out the best place to lay out the blocks across a hojillion spindles anyway. Every SAN will have a different approach to this TTBOMK but almost all of them have a hefty write cache where small random writes are coalesced into big more-sequential writes across multiple drives (ZFS and friends do this too).
Client side on an SSD, defrag doesn't really do anything either, since there's very little random read/write penalty on your average SSD and the controller will be trying its utmost to spread files across all the different flash chips anyway. Windows' automated defraggler doesn't normally run on SSDs (but can do under some circumstances).
With NTFS on plain jane hard drives, as long as you keep enough free space and you're dealing with relatveively large files, windows will generally lay the block out in a sensible manner, but you'll likely benefit from regularly running defrag on a system drive. Assuming it stays up long enough between update reboots, because I wouldn't wish windows with a platter-based hard drive for a system drive on Teresa May.
Actually, if TM is using a windows box with C: on a platter-based drive for her Brexit plans it would explain a few things.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
