"Michael R. Wayne" <wa...@msen.com> wrote:
>Long ago, back when disks were small, slow and expensive, someone
>wrote a program that properly defragged a Unix filesystem.

If it was that long ago, chances are it is pre-FFS - the System 5
File System and its predecessors.  I remember using a Motorola
SysVR3 system that included a disk de-fragmenting tool.

Re-writing a disk in-place will always be slow because you're mostly
doing small I/O's at random places on the platter.

dump/newfs/restore is the safest way to defragment a disk.  It's
probably faster than an in-place de-fragmenter as well.

Peter


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