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Re: [LUG] EXT2 filesystem: defragmenting

 

On Wednesday 13 April 2005 17:37, James Keasley wrote:

Could someone please explain what the "non-continuous" figures given by
fsck mean? I've always thought they referred to fragmentation, but
as James says above, Linux FSes don't need defragmenting...

Not needing defragmenting, is different from not being fragmented.

FFS style file systems are badly fragmented by design (well with certain
sizes of file), but the fragments are placed somewhere the disk drive can
find the pieces easily.

The point is it is not how fragmented the files are but how much you have
to move the disk heads, and spin the disks to read the complete file, as
that is what determined how long it take to read (and write) your data.

Search for "Mckusick" and "fragmentation" for more background.


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