I started a defrag 11.5 hours ago...

Luis G

<i><b>Problemator</b></i>
Staff member
:D

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dan

New Member
heh

took me ages to work out what the point of that screenshot was...

i love my kde... aww my sweet little gentoo laptop... mwah to it :)

none of the unix systems i've dealt with have had fragmentation problems... how come the windows filesystem gets so bad when other ones don't... there has to be a good technical reason.

i mean... if fragmentation on ext2 or reiserfs or xfs or whatever was a big deal then someone would have written tools to defrag it.

i remember one crusty old sysadmin telling me that he'd copy all the data off some old hpux box we had as our mailserver onto tape and then back onto the box to get rid of defragmentation, but we never quite got round to it... got a shiny new box with this wicked disk array thingy on it instead...

so yeah, fragmentation seems to be a big thing on windows but not on unix... what's the deal with that?!
 

Jon

New Member
Maybe I'm wrong, but...

fury said:
fragmentation seems to be a big thing on windows but not on unix... what's the deal with that?!

...maybe it's because the people who write Unix actually care about writing a decent operating system that utilizes your hardware with decency and respect, other than thinking about any financial rewards, as opposed to MicroShit Winballs, which doesn't give two flying fucks about your hardware - hence the numerous frequent system crashes which more often than not require a hard reset, and the odd tendency to respond to any attempt to install a device driver or a new piece of hardware with what seems to be "OH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I CAN'T BE ARSED WITH CHANGE", and demand a re-install of the whole OS (which, incidentally, it's a good idea to have your hard drive partitioned, IMO).

Damn corporations...
 

dan

New Member
fury said:
fragmentation seems to be a big thing on windows but not on unix... what's the deal with that?!
Luis G said:
PuterTutor said:
OK, do you not need to defrag in Linux?

No, the ext2 and ext3 file systems are designed to have minimum fragmentation.

yeah... but *why*...

why is it that the unix chappies can do it, but the windows ones can't?

technical chaps, technical!
 

Luis G

<i><b>Problemator</b></i>
Staff member
windows filesystems are based in clusters which are groups of continuous sectors, clusters are contiguous, if a file needs storage space, the filesystem assign the very first available cluster.

ext2 and ext3 use i_nodes, basically the file system table is "distributed" over the disk, and one inode has pointers to the sectors in which the info resides, the implementation demands that nearer files be pointed by the same inode or group of inodes, and the filesystem also reserves a certain ammount of space in order for the file to "grow".

That's basically how it works, if you want a further reading i suggest you to get "Silverzchat's Operating Systems" or "Milenkovik's Operating Systems Concepts and Design".
 

Luis G

<i><b>Problemator</b></i>
Staff member
*reading that chapter just to make sure i didn't get confused with other unix fs and ext2*

Edit: damn, the book i have doesn't have that, you'll have to trust my word :D
 
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