How is it avoided?

I've been wondering about this issue myself. I'd love to see it answered as well

obscenely simple really. it puts data in the right place to start with. why start writing data to a location on the hard drive when it will not fit...?? obviously at some level this breaks down, *very* large files etc... but that's the exception, and the filesystem does fragement, but only a really really hammered filesystem will reach maybe 3% fragementation, which is nothing compared to an average fat32 partition.

that's so sweet

but I can for the life of me not understand why M$ keeps up with it's silly fragmentation-enabled file-systems.

Anyway, lots of people encourage a move from M$ to linux by pointing out the lack of viri in linux. For me one of the major reasons was the lack of fragmentation.

Two words: Backward compatibility

M$ are obsessed with keeping everything from their previous OSes working with their latest release.

That causes a lot of their problems, especially with the internet: Windows was written as a "one user, one computer" OS, and hacked around to allow multi-user capabilities. Even today, it's a single-user OS with work-arounds rather than a true multi-user OS.

Linux was a multi-user OS from the very start, and that's one reason why it's a lot better at dealing with networking and the internet.

Still, maybe Longhorn will fix all these problems...