regular fsck runs are too disturbing - and current approach does not work very well in detecting defects!

[Phillip Susi]

Jan Claeys wrote:
> Indeed, 'smartmontools' for hardware-defects, "fsck" for
> filesystem-defects.
> 
> 
> About doing "live" fsck & defrag on a rw filesystem, IIRC Windows NT has
> a system API for doing e.g. atomic "swap 2 sectors" operations; does
> 'linux', or any of the filesystem drivers for it, support something like
> that?

I think XFS or JFS supports online defragmenting, but no other work has 
been done in that area due to lack of need.  Even the offline defrag 
package has not been maintained for the last 10 years due to lack of 
interest.  When you don't have a silly problem with fragmentation, there 
is no motivation to solve the non problem.