Re: Newbie: How do I defrag my drive?
On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:38:29 +0200
Michal Simovic <miso_sim@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> don't know, if there is a defrag utility for linux, but first of all you
> should realize that after few months there is probably no need to
Under most circumstances yes. I've been running linux for years, but
managed to try defrag out of curiosity more than anything else once on
an ext2 system many years ago. Didn't seem to accomplish much - at
least I couldnt't "feel" that things were that improved.
> defragment. linux filesystems like ext3 get fragmented a lot lot less
> than FAT32 or NTFS as far as i know.
Yes, but it depends how it is used, how much free space is available,
abnd the type of filesystem used. Under DOS/Windows of course, you
basically only have one choice of filesystem. And as the prior poster
and the article by Lew Pitcher suggests, performance of fragmented vs.
unfragmented really have separate sets of issues in DOS (or other single
user/ single tasking systtems) vs. multiuser systems like Linux.
Some fileystems are extremely resistant to fragmentation (e.g.,
ReiserFS) while others are more prone to it (JFS, for instance). In
ReiserFS there is reordering of blocks over time so that fragmentation
goes away as far as I know. I've heard that it is impossible, but I'm
skeptical about that. Needless to say, ReiserFS is very good :).
> besides there is certainly a method that reveals how much disk space is
There used to be, but I haven't looked for it in quite sometime, and so
I am not sure if it even exists anymore. It was called 'frag', and
it could be run against a particular file or set of files, or even the
whole filesystem for an aggregate figure. At the time I tried it,
several years ago, I was running a rather modest setup (compared to
now) - in faxt my entire / (ext2) was on a 350 meg drive :). It was
hard to keep that thing less than 5% empty at times. Out of curiosity,
I did a 'frag' against the whole filesytem. I encountered a large
number of files with over 40% fragmented blocks, although in overall the
file fragmentation percentage was fairly minimal.
> miso
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