Using fsck. To see fragmentation on a Unix system, you would generally use a command such as fsck that reports the percentage of fragmentation on the file system.

Files can become fragmented due to multiple reasons. One common cause is when the file system reserves excessive space for a file during its creation, resulting in gaps around it.

Given the title of this article some might think, “Oh, yeah, file fragmentation. Been there, done that, got that all covered.” But with the ever-changing state of computing environments today, it is ...

How important is system reliability? So important that entire industries have sprung up over the years to insure it. RAID systems are installed so that if one disk in a system fails, the data still ...

For those of you unfamiliar with the problem of file fragmentation, a quick—and quite simplified—primer is in order. Files are stored on a hard drive in blocks of data.

If defragmentation doesn’t occur, your file system metadata will reach maximum fragmentation and the life of SSDs will reduce drastically. Read : SSD Optimization Tips for better performance.

Figure 1: Fragmented File. ... Most Linux computers use the ext2 or ext3 file system which is known to be resilient against fragmentation and is not as severely affected when it does occur.

Fragmentation is often cited as a major challenge for the Linux platform and mobile software ecosystem. ... file system layout, and software version choices.

I tried doing a search, but that was waste of time. Just basic "should I defrag" and "when should I defrag" questions. Situation; Larger video files (500mb to 2GB) in a non O/S partition that were ...