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For non critical systems like home pcs we should disable the swap file. The memory is cheap nowadays. Buy enough mem for your needs and disable the swap file. Is better to have ns access than ms access... besides you reduce the HDD activity by a lot!!!
Currently I have 2 GB of ram and since I don't use more than 1.7 GB I can turn off swap. No more unnecessary HDD writing. All stay in the ram.
About the fragmentation. No matter what file system there will be always fragmentation. How much will it have? It depends on what activity is the HDD having. For example I think the best would be a program doing some sort of defrag whenever the computer is idle. Like putting all files contiguously in HDD maximizing the the free blocks. If there is a free block smaller than a X size then push the closest data to close that free block. That would assure you that your HDD would have the biggest free blocks whenever possible. Of course then your HDD activity would go sky high buy the count at the end of the day.
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