Defragment

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

kyle wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 k> Do you need to defragment your hard drive under Linux???

 k> I have a 4.3Gig SCSI email server, and I'm concerned about
 k> free space. 

As a practical matter, no.  It is theoretically possible for serious
fragmentation problems to develop on a Second Extended filesystem if you
habitually run the disk 95% full and have lots of tiny little files.  However,
real filesystems are generally quite effective as resisting fragmentation in
the first place, and the need for defragmentation in DOS/Windows is largely a
consequence of stupid design decisions in FAT.

Note that e2fsck will report the actual percentage of fragmentation.
 
-- Mike


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