Re: [gentoo-user] aligning SSD partitions

[Dale]

Paul Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have to say that here, it is not a whole lot of fragmentation but it
>> does seem a bit faster afterwards.  I guess it depends on what is
>> fragmented and such.  I sometimes wonder if it defrags itself.  Even
>> when I watch the fsck when booting, all the ext4 partitions have a very
>> small percentage of fragmentation.  My /boot which is ext2 is fragmented
>> as heck.  lol  I'm not worried about it tho.  ;-)  When I was using
>> reiserfs, it was always a good bit of fragmentation.
>>
>> Just thought it was worth a mention since this is the first time I saw a
>> Linux defrag tool.
> I think almost all linux defrag tools/techniques deal with file
> fragmentation only, that is to say one file with more than 1 extent,
> but don't deal with filesystem fragmentation (10000 small files
> scattered all over the drive, rather than written contiguously). So
> I'm not surprised that Peter did not see fragmentation after
> installing KDE.
>
> AFAIK almost all that modern defrag tools do is just copy the file,
> allocating the whole file at once in the copy process, and if that new
> copy has fewer extents than the old copy, it fills in the data, then
> removes the original file. The concept is not entirely dissimilar to
> the old "backup, format, restore" defrag process.
>
> Over the years I have used a poor-man's version of that concept to
> defrag files. Just move it to another drive (or -- even better -- a
> ramdrive/tmpfs), then move it back to disk (with a tool that performs
> preallocation).
>
> There is a userland defrag tool that does exactly this, on any
> filesystem. It is called "shake".
>
> Typically I only see fragmentation on large files that were copied
> from a slow source (over the network/internet), or bittorrent clients
> that do not preallocate space, etc. Any kind of streaming file that
> was written, huge multi-gigabyte video recording files, that kind of
> stuff. But the key to avoiding file fragmentation is preallocation...
>
>

I used shake before but it just didn't seem to work right for me.  I
found a script that does something and it seems to work for the most
part but still not great or anything.  I just like the way ext4 works. 
Heck, I liked it before I found the defrag tool.  I've had this install
for a while and it has never had much fragmentation even before the
tool.  So, I find it funny that they make a tool that really isn't
needed very much.  :/

Dale

:-)  :-) 

-- 
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