Defragmentation not always helpful?

[AShadeOfClear]

Once I read someone talk about how defragmentation can be harmful to performance in one particular situation: an audio workstation. If you were to record a few tracks one at a time as wav files, for example a live recording session with one track for each instrument, portions of each track file would save sequentially on the hard disk. Meaning, you would get a few bytes or so from track 1, then a few from track 2, track 3, 4, then back to 1 and repeat until the end of the recording. If you were to defragment this, the track files would be placed one next to the other, and so there would be more time spent going from the beginning of one file to the beginning of the next. However, if you were to delete a track, and rerecord it, where would it record? Would it defeat the whole purpose of this theory? It seems to me that this represents too ideal of a situation.

 

[dkozloski]

your example is correct for obsolete drives but modern examples have no such limitations. Cylinders can be read sequentially with no delays whatever.