Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

defrag98.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 76 posts

Re: Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

#61

Post by rbanffy »

andikleen2 wrote: post #29
vunderba wrote: post #23

When I was younger, my friends and I joked about making a "Disk Fragmenter" which would enumerate through every file on the disk and split them into non-contiguous clusters to make sure that the actuator arm on your platter-drive gets a PROPER WORKOUT TO FEEL THE BURN.

Such tools really exist and they're used for testing file systems, so that you have a more realistic "aged" layout on a freshly created test file systems. We also have memory fragmenters to do the same for memory for the same reasons.

On CoW systems, file and block deduplication and writes to the middle of a file will do that for you.

Re: Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

#64

Post by SoftTalker »

megagpt1 wrote: post #22
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #15

What were the major filesystem technology improvements that made this redundant?

FAT32 allocates the first free block. IIRC, file order must match disk order because reasons. Ext2 prioritized allocating the middle of free space to allow fragment-free growth on both sides and it became a standard filesystem feature after that.

And, disk capacities got a lot larger. When most of the space on a disk is free, it's easier to allocate without fragmenting.

Re: Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

#65

Post by toast0 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #36

I recall there being some techno-mysticism surrounding defragging regarding how often and when it was necessary, what it did and didn’t help, etc. I also remember the claim “Macs don’t need defragging” but I don’t know if HFS(+) was actually any less prone to fragmentation than FAT32 was. Companies like Symantec were happy to sell defragging tools to Mac users regardless.

Wikipedia claims [1]:

> The HFS Plus file system transparently defragments files that are less than 20 MiB in size and are broken into 8 or more fragments when the file is being opened.

Which I expect would have significantly reduced the need to defrag and thus reduced the joy of computing. :p

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation

Re: Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

#67

Post by atombender »

Norton Speed Disk [1] for DOS was more satisfying to watch because it would visualize reads and writes. So you'd see it grab blocks and then smush them together into contiguous areas. The Windows version was not, as I recall, as satisfying.

[1] https://youtu.be/-T712Wbc6a0

Re: Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

#69

Post by rbanffy »

lord_dut wrote: post #62
rbanffy wrote: post #60

I wish ext4, BtrFS, and XFS had something like this.

XFS does, though not visual. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/xfs_fsr.8.html

They all do, but none is visual. A visual interface would intercept block reads and writes.

Now that I mentioned it, I might know what to do with one of those LED panels.

Re: Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online

#70

Post by stoatstudios »

suprjami wrote: post #49
stoatstudios wrote: post #45

Perhaps it's appropriate for me to link to the free game I made where you play a taxi driving through Disk Defragmenter and delivering stray blocks of data to their final locations: https://safetystoatstudios.itch.io/ddr . It was pretty fun to watch Defragmenter as a kid, but it would have been better if it was interactive, kind of like the 3D maze screensaver.

AND you made it for Sega Genesis! That's so good.

Thanks :)
Post reply on HN