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From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system?
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 15:19:36 +0000 (UTC)
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On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 14:45:42 +0100, William Poaster wrote:

> Having used one version or another of GNU/Linux for 14+ years, I've
> never had to defrag a drive. I've never even thought about it, except
> perhaps when I was a n00b & first started using it.
> Since its inception, I've always used ext4 without any problems. Before
> that, I used Reiserfs & Reiser4 which I found a very good fs.

The reason for defragmenting a drive are virtual machines, of which I 
have quite a few. Since I am playing with thing like Oracle RAC, I 
frequently have to run 3 or 4 of them simultaneously. They perform 
visibly better if VMDK files are defragmented. The reason is simple to 
explain: a database full scan, which does a sequential scan on a virtual 
machine, will also do a sequential scan on the real drive if the 
underlying VMDK file is contiguous. If not, it will be translated into 
gazillion of small fragment scans, which can take time.
I don't really care about defragmenting /usr, /var or /opt. And with 3 or 
for VM's running, I don't have much memory for caching, even on my 16GB 
RAM desktop.
Regards,



-- 
Mladen Gogala
The Oracle Whisperer
http://mgogala.byethost5.com