Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#2Beautiful.
Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years...
But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#3This made me think of https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/, which moves boot files into sequential runs, which was helpful on spinning disks where seeks were slow but sequential reads were fast.
Just as an idea for a feature your defragmenter could have.
(Also this is a side thought; but I wonder if AWS AMIs and EBS volumes will boot faster if also organized sequentially.)
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#4I have a question about disk defragmenter. I've asked a couple of people before and they've said it is not possible but iirc if I stated disk defragmenter and then even so much as moved the mouse after it started it would start with the first boxes again. Do you remember this too?
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#5Beautiful. Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years... But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
I feel so seen right now. My partner complains about me closing apps on my phone consistently. I also have to hold myself back from defragging and continually cleaning up my storage drives.
I too am nearly certain that the positive benefits are approaching nil, but I still feel it should be helpful.
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#6Beautiful. Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years... But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
Except for some backups, all of my machines use solid state storage so I don't think there is a point for most people, is there?
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#7This is the most useless thing I've seen on here lately. It's not necessary on hard drives, as the page cache did a decent job of improving disk access even in the 90s, let alone with today's fast HDDs. And if you're on an SSD... it'll just burn that out faster.
I love it!
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#8Beautiful. Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years... But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
only HDD drives I use are in a ZFS pool which has a very usable fragmentation value from zpool.
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#9Beautiful. Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years... But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
Except for some backups, all of my machines use solid state storage so I don't think there is a point for most people, is there?
Sequential reads are faster for SSDs. As long as defragmentation is reducing the chance of doing a random read, it is beneficial.
Re: Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
#10I like the graphical interface and the movement of the blocks. Brings back memories of defragmenting hard drives once a month and seeing noticeable performance improvements sometimes.
> Fragmentation and extent allocation were adding measurable variance, even on NVMe,
Why exactly would there be a measurable variance on NVMe? I understand there could be some impact on magnetic hard drives. This sounds like some sort of coincidence due to other factors and that this defragmentation won’t achieve much (except for wearing out your SSD even faster in certain cases).