On 9/20/07, Al Sparks data345@yahoo.com wrote:
Why? What's different between NTFS and ext2/3 that defragging is needed in one but not the other?
Mostly it has to do with the way information is ordered and written to the filesystem. The old FAT filesystem (and to a lesser extent NTFS) was sloppy, and needed some periodic cleanup. EXT2/3 are a bit more elegant in their design and structure the data such that a defrag isn't really necessary. The filesystem *will* check itself every 180 days or every so many reboots via fsck. This is configurable with tune2fs.
That's basically the high level explanation for the differences. Once you start getting down into the really low level stuff, that's where I fall asleep no matter how much caffiene I've had.