Comment by toast0
1 day ago
Page caches are nice, but you would see meaningful reduction in load times for the OS and applications by getting data in order on spinning disks. Especially games that used most of your ram and loaded reasonably large level files.
fat seemed particularly prone to spreading files into very small chunks across the disk surface; it's not so big of a deal when fragmented files are made up of large contiguous chunks.
When I started Linux in the 90s, I remember looking for defrag utilities and finding none, but reading that defragging wasn't really necessary under ext2, because the page cache smoothed things out and/or the fs was to some degree self-maintaining. The same with NTFS. DOS file systems needed regular defragging, of course, because they were kind of garbo anyway. But coming across a real filesystem blew my mind at the time.