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We recently performed a large study on fragmentation on the NTFS file system [1]. On NTFS, we found that slightly over a quarter (26.8%) of FLV files were fragm
by Beldin 6y ago
We recently performed a large study on fragmentation on the NTFS file system [1]. On NTFS, we found that slightly over a quarter (26.8%) of FLV files were fragmented.
So if EXT4 performs similarly, it would be far more common not to have fragments.
[1] http://www.open.ou.nl/hjo/papers/di20.pdf http://www.open.ou.nl/hjo/papers/di20.pdf
(Paper accepted but conference and therefore publication delayed due to corona)
- jeroenhd 6y agoNTFS is known to allow more fragmentation than ext4 (as long as there is plenty of disk space left; full ext4 volumes will fragment). This is one reason why running Windows from a hard drive requires occasional defragmentation (done automatically in the background without you noticing) while Linux will happily run without any defragmentation at all in most cases. Fragmentation will still happen, of course, but instead of preferring write performance and accepting fragmentation as a consequence, like NTFS, the ext4 system tries to avoid fragmentation where it can. Now, in the age of SSDs and flash storage, fragmentation isn't as big a problem as it used to be, but it's nice to see the optimizations done for running an OS from a hard drive make it easier to recover byte streams from ext4 than it would be to recover them from NTFS.