Disk defragmenter in Linux

[Tim]

On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 07:57 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> Might I observe that the many-partitions layout so often recommended 
> gives you all the disadvantages of a fragmented drive from day one?

Though, that would be in situation where the system is trying to read
several different files at once.  And even with one partition, it can
still act that way, because your commands and your data files (for
instance) might be nowhere near each other on the disk structure.

If you were doing something that needed very little interruptions of
data traffic, like high resolution video capture straight to disk, I'd
be recommending that you had a separate drive for such things, on a
different host controller, too.

But I doubt, that for most people, the differences in timing between one
partition or many are going to be that noticeable.  I've run systems
using various permutations of partitions, none was really noticeably
faster than others.  My main like for partitioning is other reasons.

e.g. Ever had to sit through an 80 meg drive being checked, because one
file that you probably don't care about caused the system to do so?  On
a multi-partition system, if I see a warning about a error in /tmp, I
won't fsck the drive.

And, as you say, backing up home, or updating a system leaving home
untouched, and that sort of thing.  Not that I've noticed a way to get
Linux to leave one partition alone during the installation routine, and
use it afterwards.

There's one quite serious potential problem if you don't partition:
Something that would otherwise have filled up a /tmp partition that's
easy for you to work around to fix up, can fill up the entire drive
space, and that's much harder to deal with.

-- 
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