Disk defragmenter in Linux

[Tim]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 14:18 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> But writing to the files *during installation* might result in
> fragmentation.

Initial installation, no.  Installations of applications after a system
has been used for some time, perhaps.

This is another area where the Unix idea of keeping applications and
data (user data, variable data, temporary files, etc.) partitioned away
from brings you big benefits.

Temporary files, in their many guises, are a pain for fragmenting drives
on the Windows world, because they're generally all on the same
partition.  Put them on their own, and they only affect each other.
Which doesn't really matter, as they can be periodically removed, easily
and without harm (none of them need keeping once they've been used).

User data doesn't usually suffer too much from fragmentation unless the
user handles very large data files (mail spools, they do audio or video
editing, etc.).  Who cares if a 20kB file takes two or four head seeks
to read, just the once while being opened up?  It's not noticeable.

Variable data, such as log files, are another cause for it.  Again,
partitioning is a good solution, for a variety of reasons--not just
fragmentation, but from drive filling up by run-away or hijacked
processes.

At the very least, I like separate partitions for all of them
(/home, /tmp, /var) from the main partition/s.

-- 
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