[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The best way is to think of your file file system as a bunch of folders with those transparent envelopes for inserting paper. Let's imagine you have a twenty-page report to file. The Windows method is to look for the first empty envelope and start slotting in pages from there. This works well enough in a new folder, but once you start removing pages (deleting files) you end up putting, say, the first ten pages in, then finding the next envelope is full, so you put the next ten pages somewhere else. The more the disk gets used, the more files get split up, so eventually you have to go through and swap all the pages round - i.e. defragment.After two weeks of trial and error I began to wonder about defraging my
Mandrake dedicated box. I have version 8.2 with a standard installation.
Does this version have a defraging utility?
TIA,
Owen
This gets asked a lot but basically, because of the way Linux is setup (superior), you don't have to defrag....
What is it about Linux's setup that makes defrag unnecessary?
The UNIX/Linux method is that if you have a twenty-page report to file, you look through the folder for a space which has at least twenty free envelopes. Consequently, files only get split up if they're very big and your disk is very, very full. Logical, really, and not a new technology - this type of filesystem has been around since the 1980s.
Defragmentation, like virus-checking, is one of those cures for problems which Microsoft introduced, but which people now accept as an inevitable part of using a computer.
Sir Robin
--
"A free man ought not to learn anything under duress.
Compulsory physical exercise does no harm to the body,
but compulsory learning never sticks in the mind." - Plato
Robin Turner
IDMYO,
Bilkent University
Ankara 06533
Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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