ext3 | Linuxaria

Does linux Need Defrag ?

Aug 122011

defrag Sometimes it happen that people that I’ve brought on the “Linux side” of the operating systems ask me, “Which antivirus should i use ?” or “should i defrag my disk ?”
This is one of the most complete answer I’ve found to the second question, source Ubuntu Forum

I’d actually strongly suggest not defraging … the reason behind this? Even on windows most defraggers have 2 options, 1 Defragment, 2 Compact … sometimes called something different, but the end result’s the same.

The “defragment” is supposed to make all files into contiguous blocks. The “compact” is supposed to defragment and make the free space into a contiguous block. Now while this sounds nice, the reality is quite different:
Continue reading »

Free reserved space in ext3/ext4 Filesystems

Pills 4 Responses »

May 052011

The partitions that contains the ext3 and ext4 filesystems reserve the 5% of the total size of the filesystm by default. The idea here is even when you run out of disk space, the root user should still be able to log in and system services should still run. Without this option, the root user could be not able to acces and “clean up” since the system may become unstable, trying to log to in a filesytem full at 100%, for example. The other reason is to help the general optimization with less fragmentation of the filesystem.