ext3 defragmentation

Posted Apr 23, 2004 1:43 UTC (Fri) by prat (guest, #20866)
In reply to: ext3 defragmentation by jbh
Parent article: ext3 block reservation

I've actually looked at this before, and found a few solutions, but quickly concluded that the programs in question (which had to be run offline) seemed a little too unmaintained and unreliable to test out on my partition. The best answer I've gotten from anyone so far is that yes, there is a program that can do this, and that program is tar. =) Of course, you'd need someplace to back everything up to. Then you can just untar everything onto a clean partition, possibly with these new patches in place in the kernel you use during the restore, but since tar is probably doing this linearly anyway, I doubt it would make much difference.

Long story short, most people I've talked to have never had any problems with fragmented ext[23] filesystems. Sorry.

ext3 defragmentation

Posted Apr 23, 2004 18:35 UTC (Fri) by southey (guest, #9466) [Link]

In my (poor) opinion defragmentation is a myth. At least on Windows it doesn't change a thing except the time waiting for it to finish. There is more benefit is having files used together in the same sequence - at least this is one of the tricks MS uses to get Windows to 'boot' faster. Linux's ability to put that 'unused' memory to 'good use' also probably helps minimize fragmentation delays with file access. Harddrive technology probably also makes this a less of an issue.