Defragging Linux

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 10:21 -0800, Albus Dumbledore wrote:
>  	I am just starting out with Linux (Red Hat Workstation 3) and I have a
> lot of basic questions, such as "Do I need to defragment Linux like I do
> Windows and if so, how".  Is this the proper forum for these questions
> or is there a more appropriate one somewhere?

Well, we're here primarily to help with installation issues and
troubleshooting, but yes, we can help with most of what you seem to
want.

For your first question, no, you don't need to defrag any of the various
Linux filesystems (ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs, etc.).  The reason is that
these were designed from the beginning to be used on multiuser computers
with hard disks and are far, far more efficient than the Windows
filesystems (any of the FAT series or even NTFS).

The Windows FAT (file allocation table) filesystem was developed for DOS
systems on 320KB floppies and the various later permutations just
variations on a bad idea.  NTFS (Windows NT File System) is a not-too-
well-done pilfering of the old DEC VAX/VMS filesystem.  It's better than
FAT, but it still has many of the issues that FAT (and VAX/VMS) have,
including very inefficient handling of files that are not on contiguous
disk sectors (hence the need to defrag).

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