Disk Defragmentation

[ac]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-09-17 at 19:23 +0800, Joel Bryan Juliano wrote:
> 
> 
>> There is still some fragmentation on ext3 filesystems, on most cases
>> it's very minimal, but it also depends on time or overall usage of
>> ext3 filesystem before the fragmentation is visible. In general
>> fragmentation only happens when you do many deletes and writes on a
>> disk that is nearly full.
> 
> In general fragmentation only happens when you do many deletes and
> writes on a disk that is nearly full.

This is I understand, the important point.

If a disk is used as nearly full, it will not be able to self-defrag
as it would with more space. I understand that a windows  file is
placed in the earliest space, and the disk then fills in sequence,
rather inflexible. Deletions and size changes cause fragmentation
immediately. I think that ext3 places a file in the body of the (empty
space) partition, so that a deletion will result in a (still large)
empty space. A bit simplistic but ok for my simplistic brain.
-- 
ac