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<font face="Arial, Helvetica">Michael,<br><br>
Sorry your original email crashed. Thanks for this info. That
looks very interesting, and I'm going to save the link for later
examination. I don't have the luxury of using multiple partitions /
drives on the computers I use, however, it sounds like a great
idea. You seem to be very knowledgeable, so I'm coming to you if I
have more serious questions on the topic. 8-)<br><br>
Ron<br><br>
At 9/13/2010 12:29 AM -0400, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 10:01 PM,
Ron Frazier
<<a href="mailto:atllinuxenthinfo@c3energy.com">atllinuxenthinfo@c3energy.com</a>>
wrote:</font>
<dl>
<dd>I am interested in what everyone thinks as to the need for defrag on
EXT4
<dd>in Linux vs the need for it with NTFS and Windows.<br><br>
</dl><br>
I had written a fairly lengthy post on this only to have it eaten before
I hit “Send”. Grr.<br><br>
A good place to start reading is the Wikipedia article on filesystem
fragmentation
(<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation</a>)
which provides a good overview of the subject. Like anything on
Wikipedia, you can spend hours upon hours reading there.<br><br>
Without going to a great deal of effort (we just got back from Toledo and
I am about ready to have a long, long sleep), operating systems such as
DOS and Windows require filesystem defragmentation as a matter of routine
operation. The problem could be mitigated somewhat if different
types of files were on different filesystems (e.g., if C:\, C:\Windows,
C:\Users, C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86) were all their own
partitions), because then updates to the operating system or user
profiles would have no effect on each other. This is one reason why
a UNIX system with multiple partitions does not suffer (as much) from the
symptoms of file fragmentation. Furthermore, if you can put
filesystems that are likely to suffer a great deal of fragmentation on
their own drives, you can reduce the symptoms even further.<br><br>
I've never even thought to check fragmentation on my drives at home, nor
on the small business servers that I run; filesystem I/O is not a problem
on my systems in that regard. I do keep things heavily separated
and partitioned, and I try hard to keep temporary data on RAM disks
instead of real filesystems. If I do need a large amount of
temporary storage on a system, I'll give it its own dedicated filesystem
instead of having it share a mount point with the root filesystem or
similar; I've always found it to be good practice to keep partitions
separated from each other by functional task. Not only does it mean
that fragmentation isn't a problem across those filesystems, but it means
that it's easy to work with backing up and restoring an individual
filesystem based on its purpose (and since some filesystems change less
frequently than others, it is somewhat easier to back up data
efficiently).<br><br>
Anyway, that's really all I've the energy to spew forth tonight. Of
course, if you're interested, there is _plenty_ out there to search about
and read up on. I'd recommend starting with learning about
relatively simple filesystems like the FAT family, and then research
progressively more complex filesystems and what functionality they
provide. Then start looking into various different implementations
of those filesystems (usually, operating system kernels) to see how they
combat (or ignore!) the problems of filesystem fragmentation and other
filesystem agnostic issues.<br><br>
Filesystems can be a very fascinating thing to learn
about...</blockquote><br>
<br>
<div>--------------------------</div>
<div>(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want
to call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate
energy mailing lists and such. I don't always see new messages very
quickly.)</div>
<br>
<div>Ron Frazier</div>
<br>
<div>770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.</div>
<div>linuxdude AT c3energy.com</div>
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