Re: Newbie: How do I defrag my drive?
--- Tim Ruehsen <tim.ruehsen@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> > You don't need to. You only need to defragment your disk if your
> > operating system is incapable of keeping the fragmentation under
> > control, and Linux does not suffer from this problem.
>
> Many people say so, but it is not true.
>
> Ext2 takes some precautions to reduce fragmentation a bit (in
> comparison with
> (V)FAT), but ext2 can't prevent it. And it is not a feature of
> 'Linux' it is
> a feature of the filesystem.
>
You are right on both counts - any filesystem has some degree of
fragmentation and the feature is specific to the filesystem - but this
is more information than your average newbie really wants, so I stand
by what I said. Any filesystem used by Linux will keep the
fragmentation under control, albeit without eradicating it completely.
Yes, you could probably install Linux on a FAT filesystem but would you
really want to? Likewise, I guess you could install Windows on ext3
(if you were particularly perverse and persistent) but I wouldn't like
to see the result.
I look after (not on my own ;-) ) around 200 servers all running Linux,
some of which have been in constant use for hundreds of days. It is
simply impractical to go round defragging the disks.
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