Re: Disk Defragmentation
Jon Hughes <jonrhughes@yahoo.com> writes:
JH> What sort of Disk Defragmenters are there out there
JH> for debian? I have located one called 'defrag', but
JH> it requires me to unmount the hard drives, which is
JH> something I would (if possible) like to avoid, if it's
JH> just cause I'm lazy:b Can anyone recommend anything
JH> else, or is this the only possible solution?
AFAIK, defrag/e2defrag is the only ext2 defragmenter available. It's
generally considered the case that ext2fs is good enough about
avoiding fragmentation on its own that a defragmenter isn't usually
thought necessary, and every version of e2defrag I've played with has
advertised itself as dangerous.
At any rate, no matter what you're doing, any program that plays
around with raw blocks on the disk is going to require that the disk
be unmounted. Anything else is asking for trouble when the kernel's
view of the disk state disagrees with the actual disk state. This is
the same reason that fsck requires the disk to be unmounted before
it'll do repairs.
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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