Why Linux does not need Defragmentation
 

I'm really happy to finally get a more hands on explanation of this, I've known that Linux does not need defragmentation but I wasn't aware of exactly why.

This little article illustrates it very well for somone who is not familiar with the deeper inner workings of the computer hardware.

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/ind..._defragmenting

Sorry I couldn't repost it due to there being some formatting in the illustrations that became messed up when I tried.

Wow. That is one of the most simplistic explainations I've seen of the issue... Like you, I knew that the file system that Linux uses didn't require defragging, I had a rough idea why, but not a clear picture. Thanks for sharing that!

Definately an interesting read. Sadly I never got around to tinkering with things like that because I never really thought of it, though now I intend to go home and doublecheck how much free space I have left on my partitions.

Just an FYI NTFS does not need to be normally defragmented. The only time I find it very adventageous to defrag is when using suspend to disk on a laptop and the page file was not set to a set size. Moving all over the disk while restoring from disk to ram is significantly slower than if the pagefile is contiguous. The other situation where defragging can help is a file server with many hundreds of thousands of files where scanning for the next piece of a file might mean that the head has to wait for the entire disk to rotate around thus causing average latency to increase, this problem is exacerbated with more users. Linux does not make these physical limitations of the disk subsystem magically disappear, just the filesystem is designed to make the worst case closer to the best case whereas something like FAT has a very fast best case, an ok average case, and a horrible worst case.