Mike McMullin wrote:
On Sat, 2008-02-16 at 13:24 -0800, Joe Sloan wrote:
Jerry Houston wrote:
For years, defragging hard drives has been part of my routine system maintenance on Windows systems. It occurred to me that I've now had Linux systems up and running long enough that it might be a good idea to defragment their drives, to make sure everything is running as smoothly as possible.
I haven't been able to find any information about drive defragmentation for Linux file systems. Searching for "defrag" with the software installer turned up no results. Is it called something else in Linux land?
Is defragmentation possible for Linux file systems? Is it needed occasionally, as it is on Windows systems? A lot of windoze converts ask "where is the anti-virus software", and just as it's not really an issue, and in the same vein, defrag just isn't something linux users ever have to worry about either.
The reason is intelligent storage policies - just think of unix file systems as an office where a competent secretary keeps things filed properly while working.
We see them as being intelligent, because they make our lives so much easier, but every file system has it's pluses and minuses, the real answer, which I don't have, is how the particular file system handles constantly expanding files, and the disk allocation for same.
OTOH pc file systems are more like the office where files are tossed randomly after use, and every weekend, people are hired to come in and organize the files.
That's not true. FAT set's aside a certain amount of room for a particular file, cluster size, when a file grows past the cluster size allotted, another cluster is pointed to in the FAT table, and the file is continued there. This schema, ends up with wastes of space, and non-contiguous file parts. One defrags, in order to re-arrange the file written to the disk to be contiguously, thus avoiding the overhead due to the disks read/write head jumping all over the disk surface.
Which is the equivalent of having the contents of each files stored on consecutive pieces of paper within folders within drawers of the office fileing cabinet, as opposed to the seek-time overhead of trying to re-assemble each file as needed from pieces of paper strewn all over the office like a tornado just came through. Joe's analogy is 100% appropriate. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org