>> you're in luck cause you don't defrag an ext2/3 partition at all. defrag >> is for windows file systems. Ext file systems are a different animal >> all-together. >> > > Why? What's different between NTFS and ext2/3 that defragging is > needed in one but not the other? > IMHO, defragging is highly overrated in NTFS too. it was the old FAT/FAT32 file system that suffered from horrible performance when heavily fragmented. that said, the best way to defrag a file system is to dump it to external media, delete then recreate the file system and restore the dump.