Maurice Hendrix wrote:
> On DOS and Windows, applications exist that let you defragment the disk,
> effectively placing sectors that contain fragments of the same file in
> sequence together and/or moving files to the front of the disk. DEFRAG.EXE
> springs to mind.
>
> On Acorn ARM-machines (running ADFS) the filing-system automatically takes
> care to prevent file-fragmentations and the command *compact can be used to
> manually force this defragmentation.
>
> On Linux I'm not really aware of how the disk-fragmentation is
> counter-acted. Is the defragmentation built into the FS? What do others use?
>
"My Understanding" is that
the linux file system, ext2fs, is very resilient to fragmentation.
For the most part people don't bother to de-frag. I also recollect
that there is continuing development on the filesystem and a newer
release may yet come about.
> I've seen an application called defrag-someversion. I've had it installed
> aswell. But the docs say that I should not use it on a mounted partition :-\
> How do you then defrag the partition that the binary is on? As I only have
> two partitions (one for /boot and one for the rest) I uninstalled the app
> again because the binary will always be on the partition I want to
> defragment and the docs say that shouldn't be mounted... (Isn't that what is
> called a Catch-22 ?)
If you never defrag or only once in the proverbial "blue moon" then
I think it would be possible to put the defrag on a floppy disk, boot
it and defrag the hard disk defore mounting it. But in my several
years of working on linux systems, defragging, has never been an issue
that I can remember.
Jonathan J.
