Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years...
But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
blobdole
I like the graphical interface and the movement of the blocks. Brings back memories of defragmenting hard drives once a month and seeing noticeable performance improvements sometimes.
> Fragmentation and extent allocation were adding measurable variance, even on NVMe,
Why exactly would there be a measurable variance on NVMe? I understand there could be some impact on magnetic hard drives. This sounds like some sort of coincidence due to other factors and that this defragmentation won’t achieve much (except for wearing out your SSD even faster in certain cases).
AnonHP
Not to make everything about AI, but..
The current analogy I am using when vibe coding is it's like defragging a hard drive in terms of time wasted.
Years of sitting there as the bar crept closer to 99 in the vain hope I could turn the computer off and go to bed, just to have to sit there for another hour or so until finished.
So many late nights wasted doing, I'm not sure what.
And now I'm sat there waiting for the agent to come back..
Running for 17m.. "dealing with a complex response"..
Codex (GPT5.6) has me hooked on that loop moreso as it is, in practice, so much quicker than Claude (Opus or Fable), so I don't quite ever walk away.
Nostalgia.
_puk
This is the most useless thing I've seen on here lately. It's not necessary on hard drives, as the page cache did a decent job of improving disk access even in the 90s, let alone with today's fast HDDs. And if you're on an SSD... it'll just burn that out faster.
This cool, but can we get an option to emulate HDD noises please? I really miss the whirrs, clicks and creaks. And the little LED that indicated disk activity... but that'd be a separate project.
d3Xt3r
This made me think of https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/, which moves boot files into sequential runs, which was helpful on spinning disks where seeks were slow but sequential reads were fast.
Just as an idea for a feature your defragmenter could have.
(Also this is a side thought; but I wonder if AWS AMIs and EBS volumes will boot faster if also organized sequentially.)
jewel
Would be really cool to see two things.
First some kind of before and after benchmark, so you can actually see if defragging made a difference.
Second is a recommendation for defragging based on things like the fragmentation, free space, and whether it’s an HDD or SSD.
Especially the second one feels useful since defragging doesn’t necessarily mean improvement to the system as you said yourself.
dsemakin
Neat! I have several questions here. First of all, why does Linux not need defragmentation?
Second, is it actually true that it doesn't need it? The readme implies that this defragmenter (for Linux) produces actual benefits.
Third, it says the benefits exist even on NVMe, i.e. on SSDs? I thought defragging was relevant for spinny disks only?
Thanks
andai
> I needed a reproducible storage layout while testing a high-throughput logger.
Of course just having a compressed filesystem image to restore for each test, or a collection of images to cover various cases instead of only optimising for ideal, would be more efficient…
comments (10)
Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years...
But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.
blobdole
> Fragmentation and extent allocation were adding measurable variance, even on NVMe,
Why exactly would there be a measurable variance on NVMe? I understand there could be some impact on magnetic hard drives. This sounds like some sort of coincidence due to other factors and that this defragmentation won’t achieve much (except for wearing out your SSD even faster in certain cases).
AnonHP
The current analogy I am using when vibe coding is it's like defragging a hard drive in terms of time wasted.
Years of sitting there as the bar crept closer to 99 in the vain hope I could turn the computer off and go to bed, just to have to sit there for another hour or so until finished.
So many late nights wasted doing, I'm not sure what.
And now I'm sat there waiting for the agent to come back..
Running for 17m.. "dealing with a complex response"..
Codex (GPT5.6) has me hooked on that loop moreso as it is, in practice, so much quicker than Claude (Opus or Fable), so I don't quite ever walk away.
Nostalgia.
_puk
I love it!
bitwize
kvemkon
d3Xt3r
Just as an idea for a feature your defragmenter could have.
(Also this is a side thought; but I wonder if AWS AMIs and EBS volumes will boot faster if also organized sequentially.)
jewel
First some kind of before and after benchmark, so you can actually see if defragging made a difference. Second is a recommendation for defragging based on things like the fragmentation, free space, and whether it’s an HDD or SSD.
Especially the second one feels useful since defragging doesn’t necessarily mean improvement to the system as you said yourself.
dsemakin
Second, is it actually true that it doesn't need it? The readme implies that this defragmenter (for Linux) produces actual benefits.
Third, it says the benefits exist even on NVMe, i.e. on SSDs? I thought defragging was relevant for spinny disks only?
Thanks
andai
Of course just having a compressed filesystem image to restore for each test, or a collection of images to cover various cases instead of only optimising for ideal, would be more efficient…
But I love that this now exists instead!
dspillett