Thanks. Nice explanation. Do you know the advantages/disadvantages of the other journalized filesystems. P On Thursday 18 September 2003 06:52 am, Derek Jennings wrote: > On Thursday 18 Sep 2003 11:16 am, Paul Kaplan wrote: > > Could someone please set the record straight... > > Do files on ext3 filesystems get and stay fragmented? Does this degrade > > performance? What tools are available to defrag? > > TIA > > Paul > > Answers > Not to any significant degree, No, and Possibly, but why bother. > > To give background I will explain how files are put onto Microsoft VFAT > partitions and Ext3 > > In VFAT partitions the disc is divided into blocks. > When a file is written it is divided into block sized chunks. The first > block is always written to the first available block on the HD, the second > goes to the next available block and so on. This means that as files are > deleted holes open up in the block allocation, and subsequent files get > fragmented if they are larger than the first available hole. Eventually the > HD gets hopelessly fragmented and a defrag is required. > > By contrast Ext3 divides the HD into inodes. When a file is written to HD > it is written to an area large enough to hold it as a continuous file > without fragmenting. If there is no area large enough, then it gets > fragmented. The effect with Ext3 is that so long as the free space on the > HD is relatively large compared to the size of individual files, then > fragmentation is negligible. > It is only when the HD is nearly full, or you have a lot of really huge > files being written/deleted you might get fragmentation. In that case I > believe XFS is a better file system to use. (but am not sure why) > > derek
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