File fragmentation ext3

Viewed 3k times. I also found posts describing how to change that size via tune2fs utility. Now I've got 2 questions, that I didn't find clear answers for: should I unmount the partition before changing the reserved space.

Thank you! Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. To quote Theodore Ts'o: If you set the reserved block count to zero, it won't affect performance much except if you run for long periods of time with lots of file creates and deletes while the filesystem is almost full i. Improve this answer.

But let's be clear: ext3 fragmentation isn't at all the same as NTFS fragmentation. NTFS allocates disk blocks in extents. A "fragmented" NTFS file can have multiple inode-equivalents full of very small extents of disk blocks. Is that something that is relative to the size of the drive, amount of files, file sizes, etc? Actually I can't really. I used that example because when I learnt about the process, that was the example quoted in the guide. And subsequent to that I've used this number on quite a few systems and had no problems.

Perhaps someone else can add some info? This question has confused a great many people. If you are also trying to figure it out, then this post of MiniTool Partition Wizard is what you need. The extended file system, also known as Ext, is the first file system developed especially for the Linux Kernel. However, the Ext file system has some drawbacks such as fragmentation and immutability of inodes. So, the second extended file system Ext2 was released in From then on, Ext3 and Ext4 file systems come out one after another.

The three types of extended file systems are common Linux file systems as well. Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4 are all extended file systems created for Linux. But they have differences in many aspects like file size limit, default inode size, journaling, and so on. Now, we will explore the differences of Ext4 vs Ext3 vs Ext 2 in detail. Ext2 is the second extended file system that was initially designed by French software in As the first commercial file system for Linux, Ext2 breaks through some limitations of Ext.

Its maximum individual file size can be up to 2TB and file system size can be from 4TB to 32TB depending on block size. It is the most basic and portable file system in several Linux distributions, including Debian and Red Hat Linux. Well, the Ext2 file system has some disadvantages. It was designed to hold data in blocks of equal size on the storage media, which lets an average of half of the block size be wasted for each file. For instance, with a block size of bytes, each bytes file requires 2 blocks, then over half of the block size is wasted.

Compared with Ext3 and Ext4, Ext2 has no journaling feature which can minimize data corruption in case of an interruption to the power supply. Here we summarize its pros and cons as follows:.

Now, you should have an overall understanding of Ext2. Ext3 stands for the third extended file system introduced in November with Linux 2. It is a journaling file system that can be used on many popular Linux distributions.

Compared with Ext2, the main benefit of Ext3 is journaling where all changes can be tracked, which improves reliability and reduces the possibility of file system corruption due to system crashes or power failures. Another significant advantage is that Ext3 allows you to in-place upgrade from Ext2 without having to back up and restore data. Both Ext2 and Ext3 file systems use e2fsporgs as the standard set of utilities, which makes the conversion between them easier.

Log in to post comments. So, in your case, you're probably hitting that. Furthermore, no amount of allocator smarts will make a fully contiguous file if it's larger than the distance between two block bitmaps. The first 3 files are not deleted but renamed after each unsuccessfull tries, to not try to position the new file at the exact same place on the disk. I do agree on the fact that if the two fragments are nearby it should not produce performance loss.