Re: [gentoo-user] Normal disk speed?

[Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net>]

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Am 01.10.2010 03:12, schrieb Adam Carter:
>     Your harddisk seeks, everything is slow.
> 
> So does that then mean that my options are;
> 1. Defragment, so there is less seeking
> 2. Get an SSD
> 
> Since 2 is too expensive for a decent size drive, is there anything i
> can do about 1 without a backup and restore operation? Or will the
> fragmentation be very small on reiser3 anyway (i mount with notail) so I
> should just accept things as they are.

To prevent fragmentation, try to always keep a decent amount of free
space on each partition. That way, the FS driver can allocate space for
new files without too much fragmentation (a fragment every 2 MB or so
doesn't really hurt performance).

If you had enough free space on your partition when you created the
mp3-files there, I don't think fragmentation is an issue here. The files
likely never grew in size which would cause fragmentation.

Of course, the situation changes again when the free space on your file
system was already heavily fragmented even if there was enough of it. It
all depends on your usage pattern of that disk to make an educated guess
if that is true.

The good thing about hard disks is that you can usually hear whether
they are seeking or reading sequentially. If you hear a lot of seeking
on sequential operations, it is time to reformat the partition or at
least erase and recreate the affected files.

Hope this helps,
Florian Philipp


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