Defragment HDD

[Bill Moran]

Sue Blake wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 04:30:47PM -0400, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> 
>>"Peter Rosa" <prosa at pro.sk> writes:
>>
>>>OK, but it is not the "real defragmenting" like Norton Speedisk
>>>or MS Defrag on windoze machines.
>>>Is there anything other ?
>>
>>The term doesn't typically refer to quite the same thing on Unix.  No
>>defragmentation program of that type is needed, due to different filesystem
>>internals.  See the old (but still useful) /usr/share/doc/smm/05.fastfs
>>for a bit of a better introduction.
> 
> You'd be surprised how common this defrag request is... 
> and how useful those old docs can be.

I wouldn't ... I've hit this question a few times and use the doc
to explain it.

> Recently I had the head of IT and the VMS administrator standing
> over me and demanding that I defrag the unix servers routinely
> once a month, like the VMS guy always does and the Microsoft guy
> had agreed to. They'd gone into a dramatically serious little
> whisperfest before they marched over and started throwing accusations
> and demands, refusing any response that sounded like "but".

See ... you handled this very differently that I did.  I would have just
said, "I already do defragment it regularly," and shown them the output
during boot that shows the low level (usually less than 1%) of block
fragmentation on the disks.  If they don't know what that means or how
it works, well ... that's why _I'm_ the FreeBSD admin and not them.

I've occasionally used the explanation, "defrag is built in, it defrags
each file _as_ it's saving it."  It's a little oversimplified, but not
completely incorrect.  You can even show them the space/time settings
you can change to "control the level of defragmentation."

> Oh they were quite serious, believing that Microsoft and VMS need it
> therefore every filesystem does, and they wouldn't accept that it is
> unnecessary for unix, no matter what I told them, nor could they
> explain to me why the venerable VMS had such a lousy filesystem that
> in this day and age it still falls over its feet whenever it gets
> fragmented which is often. They were convinced that I just didn't
> care about defragmentation or know the right tools to use, and no
> amount of reason would shake that. I was, of course, unable to comply
> with the manager's parting directive and said so.

Hehe ... I find it humorous that when you went to the trouble to try to
educate them, they refused to be educated.

> While waiting for advice that the room had been booked for my pending
> disciplinary interview, I emailed the abovementioned fastfs doc to the
> guys concerned, offered to accept an equivalent doc for VMS, and asked
> them to explain to me again what "defragging" does when they know how the
> unix filesystem works. I have not heard a peep from the manager since,
> and not a soul has mentioned filesystems within my earshot again :-)

Obviously, I can't be sure, but I suspect that they never brought it up
again because they were unable to understand the document.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com