Yes, SSDs and thin-provisioned VM disk images, but not HDDs. The consensus seems to be that defragmenting is no longer recommended on modern files systems, so no maintenance for an HDD.
- Y Sent from a device with a very small keyboard and hyperactive autocorrect. On Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:04 AM J. Milgram <milg...@cgpp.com> wrote: > > Cool, two things I didn't know about. > > Is fstrim only for SSDs? I just tried it on a partition on my spinning, > soon to be upgraded HD and got a "discard operation not supported" message. > > thanks > Judah > > > > On 7/30/25 07:51, Yehuda Katz wrote: > > You should make sure fstrim runs to clean up your free space. > > > > Do you have a lot of free space? A tool that can copy while ignoring > > the free space will make it faster. I personally use Clonezilla. > > > > - Y > > > > Sent from a device with a very small keyboard and hyperactive > autocorrect. > > > > On Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 7:34 AM J. Milgram <milg...@cgpp.com> wrote: > > > > Soliciting advice from the pros... (and experienced amateurs) > > > > I find myself getting ready to do a hard disk upgrade on my > > desktop. In > > the past, I would only do this when it was time to upgrade the > > system so > > I would just do a fresh install on the new disk. > > > > This time, my system is as current as can be and everything's working > > great so I'm thinking why not just copy everything over to the new > > disk. > > I have an external USB enclosure for the new disk so can in theory > > set > > it up before installing it in the machine. I can see two basic > > options: > > > > 1) make an fs on the new disk and cp -a oldroot newroot (or rsync for > > that matter) > > > > 2) dd if=olddevice of=newdevice > > > > What does everyone else do in this situation? Are there options I > > haven't considered? > > > > Re #1, I'm worried about getting the device files set up ... I don't > > think cp will make them. It seems rsync has an option to do that, > > but > > do I dare use it? I presume I'll have to run lilo again. (This is a > > geriatric pre-UEFI machine.) > > > > Re #2, does this get me out of having to run lilo? Not that it's so > > hard. I guess if I'm dd'ing a partition (/dev/sda1,2,3) and not the > > whole disk (/dev/sda), I probably will have to. > > > > Anyway, grateful for any thoughts... Hope you folks have a > > comfortable > > place to work. It's a steambath out there. At least no tsunamis. > > > > ciao > > > > Judah > > > > > > -- > > ===== > > milg...@cgpp.com > > 301-257-7069 > > > > You received this email because you are subscribed to the UM Linux > > User's Group (UM-LINUX) mailing list. If you would like to > > unsubscribe from this list, simply send an email to > > lists...@listserv.umd.edu with the message signoff UM-LINUX in the > > body. > > > > -- > ===== > milg...@cgpp.com > 301-257-7069 > > > > You received this email because you are subscribed to the UM Linux User's Group (UM-LINUX) mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe from this list, simply send an email to lists...@listserv.umd.edu with the message signoff UM-LINUX in the body.
