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Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system?

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Robert Heller a écrit :
> At Sat, 30 Aug 2014 14:42:37 +0200 Pascal Hambourg <boite-a-spam@plouf.fr.eu.org> wrote:
> 
>> Mladen Gogala a écrit :
>>> 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. [...]
>>
>> There is a huge gap between "contiguous" and "gazillion of small
>> fragments". If fragments are big enough (wrt. the disk sequential speed
>> * access time product), the adverse effects of fragmentation should be
>> minimized.
>>
>> In ext4, isn't the use of extents supposed to reduce fragmentation and
>> improve large file performance ?
[...]
>> Besides, shouldn't VM managers be aware of this issue and grow virtual
>> disk files by big chunks in order to limit fragmentation too ?
> 
> I suspect that Mladen Gogala's problem is that a VMDK file is not really a
> 'disk' in the normal sense, but some kind of sparce copy-on-write psuedo disk
> (which might be fine for 'toy' VMs on a desktop system with limited actual
> disk space). If he was using 'real' disk space (eg a LVM logical volumn),
> things might be different.

A VMDK _file_ is of course not a raw block device but a file in a
filesystem. The default granularity for sparse VMDK files seems to be 64
KiB, which is way too small to avoid fragmentation issues by itself.
However shouldn't it benefit from ext4 extents ?

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External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Evgenii Sputnik <esputnik7788@gmail.com> - 2014-07-31 13:35 -0400
  Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be.invalid> - 2014-07-31 19:44 +0200
    Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Evgenii Sputnik <esputnik7788@gmail.com> - 2014-08-29 07:45 +0700
      Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be.invalid> - 2014-08-29 03:37 +0200
      Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-08-28 21:09 -0500
        Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2014-08-29 21:16 +0200
    Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com> - 2014-08-29 02:46 +0000
      Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be.invalid> - 2014-08-29 05:14 +0200
        Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? William Poaster <wp@dev.null> - 2014-08-29 14:45 +0100
          Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com> - 2014-08-29 15:19 +0000
            Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Pascal Hambourg <boite-a-spam@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2014-08-30 14:42 +0200
              Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-08-30 09:09 -0500
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Pascal Hambourg <boite-a-spam@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2014-08-30 17:41 +0200
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Keith Keller <kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> - 2014-08-30 15:21 -0700
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com> - 2014-08-31 17:13 +0000
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-08-31 13:24 -0500
                Is VirtualBox "lame"? (Was: something else...) gazelle@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) - 2014-08-31 20:23 +0000
                Re: Is VirtualBox "lame"? (Was: something else...) Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-08-31 15:51 -0500
                Re: Is VirtualBox "lame"? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-08-31 23:58 +0000
                Re: Is VirtualBox "lame"? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-08-31 21:54 -0500
                Re: Is VirtualBox "lame"? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2014-09-01 07:54 +0100
                Re: Is VirtualBox "lame"? Marc Haber <mh+usenetspam1118@zugschl.us> - 2014-09-01 08:53 +0200
                Re: Is VirtualBox "lame"? (Was: something else...) The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2014-09-01 07:47 +0100
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com> - 2014-08-31 21:00 +0000
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-08-31 18:50 +0000
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com> - 2014-08-31 21:01 +0000
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-01 00:06 +0000
                Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2014-09-01 07:50 +0100
              Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@gmail.com> - 2014-08-31 03:18 +0000
  Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-07-31 12:54 -0500
    Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Unknown <dog@gmail.com> - 2014-08-14 12:39 +0000
      Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Keith Keller <kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> - 2014-08-14 08:15 -0700
  Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Tim Watts <tw_usenet@dionic.net> - 2014-07-31 19:08 +0100
    Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2014-07-31 14:27 -0500
  Re: External hard drive usage. NTFS or other file system? Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> - 2014-07-31 12:43 -0700

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