On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Grant<emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> I know Linux systems aren't supposed to become fragmented, but I've >>> also read that it can happen eventually. I'm on ext3. I've read that >>> ext4 will have a defragmenter but that it doesn't have one yet. >> >> It's not that they aren't supposed to become fragmented, it is that >> they try to avoid it. There is a big difference, and things like >> streaming writes (downloads, bittorrents, etc) can cause extreme >> fragmentation. > > Yeah, that's when I'm hearing the HD access I didn't hear before. I > run miro and it's downloading several torrents all the time. It never > made a sound before, but now there's a rhythmic grinding sound when > miro is running, maybe because the HD is more full now. Could shake > help with this? To find out, should I be running it on the partially > downloaded torrents?
Well, bittorent does not download in sequential order, so it is constantly doing random reads and writes. You may not be able to avoid the HD grinding during this kind of activity. Download to a RAM drive or SSD or something perhaps. Fragmentation definitely gets worse the nearer you are to full (which for me is always). I have seen very small files with hundreds of fragments as I live at 99% of my space used. They say a hard drive has 2 states: new and full :) It certainly wouldn't hurt to defrag the partial files, though you may want to pause your download before doing it (I don't know how much locking/blocking may occur on in-use files). Some bittorrent clients have an option to write a placeholder file; this is supposed to prevent fragmentation since it's allocating the space for the whole file immediately. Vuze is what I use, it calls this option "allocate and zero new files on creation". The down-side is it could take a while to initialize if you're downloading something huge, especially if you're saving to a network or USB hard drive that's not very fast.
