Robert Barish
How does one defrag a hard drive in linux?
It has already been mentioned that fragmentation is not a problem for the ext2 filesystem. I'll add several notes: - ext2 FS can be defragmented via the program defrag (see e.g. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/filesystems/) The code is rather old so be prepared for anything if you run it. (I haven't done it and I don't intend to do it.) Here is a part of its README file: <README> Performance improvements for ext2fs after defragmentation will probably be around 5-10% at most for random access (such as running binaries or loading demand-paged libraries), or 10-25% for sequential accesses: sequential accesses are much more sensitive to fragmentation that random accesses are. The results you obtain will depend a lot on how full and old your filesystem is, of course. </README> - Defragmenation can also be done by backing up the filesystem (e.g. by dump), recreating it (mkfs), and restoring (e.g. by restore) the data. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se