ext3 defragging?

[kszl2005]

This page might explain it a little better
http://wiki.arslinux.com/About_Defragmentation

:P

the fs ext3 need not be defragmented ,but why ext2 need ??why???

[budman7]

In ext2, they didn't have the journaling perfected yet. So prolonged use would result in fragmentation.

That was solved in ext3, and Reiserfs, jfs and xfs improved upon it.

[bigtomrodney]

Not that it changes your point - but the ext2 didn't have any jouranlising. ext3 is ext3 with journal. In fact you can actually mount ext3 with ext2 drivers, and it will still work - except for the journal. Next time you mount under ext3 drivers it attempts to play catchup to some extent. The guy who developed it had a really interesting interview in LXF a while back.

To my understanding ext2 even under tremendous pressure will on go to about 8% fragmentation, so that's 92% contiguous files.

Prety impressive isn't it? ReiserFS works a litle bit different but mostly in that it was specifically developed as journal and ext3 was "just" an extension. Other useful systems are XFS which is actually designed with large file handling in mind.