dependable, I see from your job title you are a network engineer. Did Qtel really pull this advice from press releases from defrag software supplier. Don't you think that might be a bit biased?

Here's what the guy behind the research had to say after he left the company:

"Larger and faster drives have minimized the impact of fragmentation. The Windows file system tends to fragment files all on its own to a small degree, but fragmentation starts for real when the drive starts to get full—as in over 70%. "As the drive fills up, the larger areas of free space become scarce and the file system has no choice but to splatter large files around the disk. As the drive gets really full (over 90%), the file system then starts to fragment the MFT and the Pagefile. Now you've got a full drive, with lots of fragmented files, making the job of the defragmenter nearly impossible because it also needs space to do its job. "It is my opinion that a drive that is more than 80% full is not defragmentable. You can see that effect with huge hard disk drives, since they generally use smaller percentages of the drive's total free space. A side-effect is that the overall fragmentation is reduced, and the fact that these drives have faster seek times makes the effect even less noticeable.

"At the time I worked on Diskeeper, I always told people to 'defragment early and often' so that they could take advantage of the free space before their drive starts to fill up. This way, they could see a marginal improvement now, but, more importantly help, the defragmenter from getting log-jammed later on. With today's large drives, even this is not an issue."

Source: http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1216336,...

Of course, the real stupidity in your insistence about defragging is that I use a filesystem that defrags on the fly (HFS Plus), and I still get terrible bandwidth. Are you saying that all the Mac OS X users in Qatar are just imagining the rubbish network performance?