NTFS

I ran into a bug just today that I'm still struggling to believe. A large Oracle server fell over, just reporting "IO errors". The issue was ultimately traced to NTFS's handling of fragmentation[0].

I've gone about ten years thinking running a defrag - particular on a virtual disk sitting on a SAN in a RAID array - made no sense. Today's downtime says otherwise.

It's one thing to perform poorly. But seeing services just die with disk write errors on a disk that's 30% full has left me with a very low opinion of NTFS. Our Oracle person sounds like a desktop maintenance person from the 90's making an issue out of "the importance of weekly defrags".

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/967351