On Tuesday 14 August 2001 09:48, Jason Guidry wrote: > I'm always discovering holes in my linux education, and the thread on fsck > made me think of defragmenting hard drives. is there a linux eq? what are > the issues with data optimization/disk defragging under linux? http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg17753.html I wrote that a good little while ago but it still applies. There is actually a defragmenter available. It does not seem to significantly improve performance, because ext2 keeps fragmentation very low and Reiser keeps it nonexistent. JFS and ext3 and XFS are also rather insensitive to the fragmentation issue. You see, FAT was originally designed for 360K and 720K floppies. It stacks files one after another instead of keeping the disk rather evenly populated across its whole extent with contiguous data files, which makes fragmentation management much easier. Of course, no one really knows what NTFS does but it seems to be another system subject to fragmentation whose performance can be significantly improved by defragmenting. I have a little program called FSledge which tests filesystems. It produces 100000 files from one to 3 k in size and then begins changing a random selection of 500 of them per second in the range of 2-8 k in size. After 8 hours of the Filesystem Sledgehammer, an ext3 partition was only 2.2% non-contiguous (and remember we use 1k blocks instead of FAT32's 4k clusters). Civileme
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