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

[Phillip Susi]

Jan Claeys wrote:
> Ext2/ext3 suffer from fragmentation too, when available disk space gets
> low enough.

Yea.... that's why the defrag package was written.

> But I think a similar API could be used to mark & move bad sectors or
> "lost" sectors, and that's more related to this discussion...

As I said, there is no need to make such an effort because ext rarely 
becomes fragmented enough to worry about.  The fact that the defrag 
package has not really been maintained in 10 years shows that there is 
no strong need for an offline defrag, let alone an online one.