I've installed a lot of things (some quite large) that I have since removed. At one time my 160GB drive was almost full, now I'm back to about 27GB free. I'm going to free up more so that I can install Ivory eventually.
Which leads me to my question in the subject line. Do they ever need it and if so, how does one go about doing it?
Thanks in advance
Does Receptor's HD ever need defragging?
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- KVRian
- 1116 posts since 22 Apr, 2005 from Nashville, TN USA
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- KVRist
- 69 posts since 9 Jan, 2006
From what I've learned, ext3 generally don't need to be defragged. It's much better (clever) at storing data than f.eg. FAT32 and NTFS. So to answer your question, no, you shouldn't need to defrag it. (Actually I'm not quite sure that you even can defrag an ext3 filesystem).
However, as with all filesystem, performance declines when you run out of space. That's just the way it is. If the performance drop is noticeable is another question (my guess is that you probably won't notice it at all).
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Olle Gustafsson
However, as with all filesystem, performance declines when you run out of space. That's just the way it is. If the performance drop is noticeable is another question (my guess is that you probably won't notice it at all).
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Olle Gustafsson
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1116 posts since 22 Apr, 2005 from Nashville, TN USA
Thanks Olle.
When you say "performance declines when you run out of space", would this affect READ performance, WRITE performance, or both. I'm just wondering if my nearly full drive state could have been affecting the performance of the DFD used in NI Kontakt-based instruments (I have a LOT of these loaded).
And can I assume that once I free up a significant portion of the drive, any prior performance degradation goes away?
Thanks again!
When you say "performance declines when you run out of space", would this affect READ performance, WRITE performance, or both. I'm just wondering if my nearly full drive state could have been affecting the performance of the DFD used in NI Kontakt-based instruments (I have a LOT of these loaded).
And can I assume that once I free up a significant portion of the drive, any prior performance degradation goes away?
Thanks again!
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- KVRist
- 69 posts since 9 Jan, 2006
This goes a bit above my technical knowlegde; but I'll try to explain anyway (the following can be jibber jabber that is, feel free to correct me).
Think of the harddrive as a large football field. And every file is made up by one or more pair of football shoes. You have one player that runs around picking up these shoes and reading the shoesize whenever you want to access the data containd in the shoes.
If you have a fragmented field of shoes, the poor player have to run around like crazy to read the data.
If you however have the shoes belonging to the perticular data you're interested in one area of the field, the player don't have to run around as much, hence he can perform a bit better.
Now think you have the field almost full of shoes and you have to add another chunk of data that doesn't fit in a empty area of the field. Then the filesystem put's the information wherever it has free space. Then the file get's fragmented.
So, to answer your question. Any data that's allready stored on the harddrive doesn't move around just because you remove some files. What happends is that you get more "free spaces" on the field, which in fact can lead to more fragmentation the next time you decide to throw in a couple of shoes. (That's what I meant with performance declines when you run out of space). The filesystem then put the shoes wherever there's an free area.
There's also a scoreboard that the player looks at so he knows where to run first when he starts picking up shoes. This is the file allocation table. The scoreboard + how the player thinks when adding/removing shoes = the filesystem.
But, all this shouldn't worry you. Since Linux and it's filesystems generally have really strong players and clever referees that organizes the scoreboard. So, even if you add/delete shoes over several years, I wouldn't worry about declining performance in any noticeable way. Not unlike let's say a FAT32 windoze system where you have to run a defrag quite often to keep the filsystem in good shape.
To sum it up I'd like to say this: let the fact that there are almost no defragmantation utilities for ext3 filesystem speak for itself. You simply don't have to worry about that when running ext3.
There are more than one competent filesystems in the world of Linux; reiserfs, xfs and to mention some. I hope Muse did their homework and tested the performance of all these before deciding to use ext3. There are also several options when creating the filesystem that can boost the performance.
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Olle Gustafsson
Think of the harddrive as a large football field. And every file is made up by one or more pair of football shoes. You have one player that runs around picking up these shoes and reading the shoesize whenever you want to access the data containd in the shoes.
If you have a fragmented field of shoes, the poor player have to run around like crazy to read the data.
If you however have the shoes belonging to the perticular data you're interested in one area of the field, the player don't have to run around as much, hence he can perform a bit better.
Now think you have the field almost full of shoes and you have to add another chunk of data that doesn't fit in a empty area of the field. Then the filesystem put's the information wherever it has free space. Then the file get's fragmented.
So, to answer your question. Any data that's allready stored on the harddrive doesn't move around just because you remove some files. What happends is that you get more "free spaces" on the field, which in fact can lead to more fragmentation the next time you decide to throw in a couple of shoes. (That's what I meant with performance declines when you run out of space). The filesystem then put the shoes wherever there's an free area.
There's also a scoreboard that the player looks at so he knows where to run first when he starts picking up shoes. This is the file allocation table. The scoreboard + how the player thinks when adding/removing shoes = the filesystem.
But, all this shouldn't worry you. Since Linux and it's filesystems generally have really strong players and clever referees that organizes the scoreboard. So, even if you add/delete shoes over several years, I wouldn't worry about declining performance in any noticeable way. Not unlike let's say a FAT32 windoze system where you have to run a defrag quite often to keep the filsystem in good shape.
To sum it up I'd like to say this: let the fact that there are almost no defragmantation utilities for ext3 filesystem speak for itself. You simply don't have to worry about that when running ext3.
There are more than one competent filesystems in the world of Linux; reiserfs, xfs and to mention some. I hope Muse did their homework and tested the performance of all these before deciding to use ext3. There are also several options when creating the filesystem that can boost the performance.
--
Olle Gustafsson
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- KVRian
- 571 posts since 14 Oct, 2004 from UK
Is it time to World Cup fever already ? 
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1116 posts since 22 Apr, 2005 from Nashville, TN USA
Olle, your football analogy was great. Thanks.
Coming from the DOS/Windows/Mainframe worlds, I am amazed that any file system would never need defragging...actually more "sceptical" than amazed I guess.
So, I searched for "ext3 defrag" and like you said, they just don't exist! So, I guess I will quit worrying about it
This may be of interest to others reading the thread:
"There is no ext3 defragmentation tool. An offline ext2 defragmenter, e2defrag, exists but requires that the ext3 filesystem be converted back to ext2 first. However, defragmentation has long been considered a non-issue for ext2/ext3, since they are much better at placing files on the disk versus old FAT-based filesystems."
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3
Coming from the DOS/Windows/Mainframe worlds, I am amazed that any file system would never need defragging...actually more "sceptical" than amazed I guess.
So, I searched for "ext3 defrag" and like you said, they just don't exist! So, I guess I will quit worrying about it
This may be of interest to others reading the thread:
"There is no ext3 defragmentation tool. An offline ext2 defragmenter, e2defrag, exists but requires that the ext3 filesystem be converted back to ext2 first. However, defragmentation has long been considered a non-issue for ext2/ext3, since they are much better at placing files on the disk versus old FAT-based filesystems."
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3