Use of contig exchanges decreased file fragmentation for increased free space fragmentation.

However, a "repacker" tool was planned for the next Reiser4 file system to deal with file fragmentation.

Prep for Shrink is specifically designed to pack all data to the beginning of a volume and may result in the creation of file fragmentation.

The aim of any defragger is to reduce or eliminate file fragmentation, and thereby improve the performance of the file system.

Individual file fragmentation occurs when a single file has been broken into multiple pieces (called extents on extent-based file systems).

File system check and defragmentation tools typically only account for file fragmentation in their "fragmentation percentage" statistic.

This largely avoids file fragmentation when several files are concurrently being appended to, thus avoiding their becoming excessively intertwined.

It did not support file fragmentation (like the file system used with RT-11) and required frequent file defragmentation.

This reduces or eliminates file fragmentation and possibly file scattering too.

Like flash drives, hard disks also suffer from file fragmentation, which can reduce access speed.