[GRLUG] No defragging

[Michael Mol]

On 1/30/07, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
>  A friend said he paid $40 for a program
>  to defrag his hard drive.
>
>  His machine is a Mac running OS X.
>
>  I've never heard of defragging a hard
>  drive under Linux or Unix.
>
>  Does it make an sense?

On Linux, with ext2, not really.  You can't do it live, so he
partition is inaccessible while the defrag takes place, and ext2 tends
to avoid fragmentation, anyway.  Plus, one risks data corruption of
the defrag utility is interrupted. (Or, at least, that was the case
last time I looked into it.)

YMMV with other filesystems.

IMO, the best way to avoid fragmentation is to avoid filling up the
drive.  One way to do that is to set the minimum system space setting
on an ext2/ext3 filesystem to a percentage other than zero.  However,
since this is the default, there's little one needs to worry about.

-- 
:wq