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I remember the sense of deep satisfaction and virtue when I defragged my hard drive. Then I learned FreeBSD. I kept trying to figure out how to defrag the parti
by ioman 5y ago
I remember the sense of deep satisfaction and virtue when I defragged my hard drive. Then I learned FreeBSD. I kept trying to figure out how to defrag the partitions. When I learned that the filesystem took care of it continuously my mind was blown.
- cable2600 5y agoSO did OS/2. People wanted the defrag of Windows 95 or Norton Utilities but OS/2 defragged in the background. SSD drives don't need to be defragged.
- sundvor 5y agoNVME drives still like some TLC optimisation, i.e running TRIM on a regular basis.
- flatiron 5y agoMy mid 90s is FreeBSD. Two floppies and a 14.4k on the install. 486 66dx2 with 20 megs of ram and the thing cooked. I used that server up until 2002 as a proxy server (this is before the age of updating software for security). I finally didn’t need it, it simply never broke.
- xtracto 5y agoFor me it was late 90s. A friend of the family bought for me Walnut Creek's FreeBSD CD set, with all the stickers and other goodies. They sent it all the way to my godforsaken small town in Mexico. As a 12 year old it was soooo cool. I remember spending hours installing (incluing configuring and compiling the kernel in an ncurses based interface). I printed the whole FreeBSD manual and my mom bound it for me. Great times!
- op00to 5y agoWould you have been able to get FreeBSD otherwise? Like, mid 90s I remember downloading Slackware from a BBS. Floppy after floppy. Was that available in your area at the time?
- xtracto 5y agoI dont think so. BBSs were not really a thing in Mexico... particularly in a city as small as mine. Maybe in Mexico city. But long distance calls were super expensive (mom used to talk to my grandma living in another city only once a week for 30 mins). I think I might have been able to get something in the local public university computer centre. It was the beginning of the internet (14.4 modems min to connect to the university, which was the only internet provider) Great fun times!
- protomyth 5y agoThe printed FreeBSD Handbook with the 2.5 CD-ROM was amazing at the time. An open source OS with a book that was better than some of the commercial OS offerings. We setup the colleges first mail server with that combo.
- vardump 5y agoRemember those times. Some PCs just last. A 2.4 GHz Core2 Quad I had, I think from 2008, is still going strong and can run most modern software just fine. It's amazing how little progress there has been in last 13 years. In the nineties you had to upgrade every two years or so just to be able to run current software. I think 2021 computer has a good chance of being still completely usable in 2040.
- nix23 5y agoMy Main-PC is now 11-12 years old, it's a HP Z600 upgraded to the max, buy'd a second CPU for 15$ additional 24GB ram (now 48GB) for like 100$ and a new GPU for 350$ some time ago, and it still runs like a champ.
- vardump 5y agoAlso got one HP Z-something (can't remember) PC, a bit later with a Xeon CPU (or two?) with 24 GB RAM. Otherwise great, but it's very power hungry, heats up a room in a hurry.
- orobinson 5y agoIntel Q6600 I presume? Great CPU. PC I a built in 2008 has the same. I recently retrieved it from my parents’ attic and updated it to Windows 10 - still works like a charm.
- tjoff 5y agoThat is probably the Q6600, I had it as well. Very good CPU at the time and I think I had it for 6-7 years as my main computer. The next time I got an (quite expensive) 6-core CPU. And the difference was mindblowing. Not because of the extra cores but the responsiveness and single-core performance was out of this world. I'm currently building my next computer, and the difference again is just staggering. And that is not even factoring in that the next one has got 12-cores. It is not that the progress hasn't been slow (I guess it has if you compare it to the pace of the past), but I think it has more to do with computers back then still being very capable. You can still fire up some CAD software and do proper work on the Q6600. I mean, right until you want to listen to music or do some very light web browsing. Then it will suddenly become quite painful. The amount of waste in today is incomprehensible. No seriously, properly incomprehensible.
- reincarnate0x14 5y agoI had a FreeBSD doitall-machine from 1998 to 2006 on some Pentium-ish thing with an AT motherboard. Moved a few thousand miles and it didn't get unboxed, until 2020 when I needed an AT PSU for something unrelated. Prior to cannibalizing it I powered it up long enough to check that it would still send email and run brief X session to hit YTMND in 15 year old Firefox.
- wenc 5y agoThis looks like Norton Utilities' Speed Disk. My 8-year-old self really thought that rearranging blocks to be sequential really made the disk faster. In reality though, the increase in performance was barely noticeable.
- neltnerb 5y agoI suppose it solves the support staff's problem of convincing a customer that they fixed an issue.
- NavinF 5y agoDefrag absolutely helped in the winxp days if your HDD was always >90% full. Every chunk of data written to a full HDD would get spread across the platter, cutting your read and write IOPS to a fraction of what you expect. It was especially noticeable on laptops since their platters spin slower.
- mrich 5y agoFor most file systems performance suffers at latest at the 90% full mark, if not before.
- anyfoo 5y agoAren’t you selling it short? Spinny disks, especially in the days before NCQ/TCQ have a vast imbalance between reading sectors sequentially and positioning the head to a new track. NCQ/TCQ later helped a bit by optimizing the path the head takes (With Physics!) when multiple operations are in the queue, but a completely fragmented disk drive seems like it will underperform noticeable against one where everything is laid out neatly in a linear fashion, at least in some access patterns (reading large files in one go). But I’d be interested in any real data anyway.
- wenc 5y agoI can't conduct the experiment anymore obviously, but to qualify my perceptions -- if you try to do a linear read from a 90% fragmented filesystem, performance would definitely suck and defragging would obviously provide perceptible benefit. Most of the time however, my disk was probably only about 30% fragmented (if I recall correctly from Speed Disk). I was running DOS on a FAT file system where there was no swap file or anything that would cause massive fragmentation except deleting and installing programs, and maybe some temp files created by certain programs. The performance delta for me was barely noticeable on a 40MB Seagate IDE drive.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoUFS is fragmentation resistant by virtue of its allocation algorithms. It still get fragmented under certain patterns or if free space gets low. I'm not sure if FreeBSD did any online defragmentation back then, maybe it does now with softupdates? I know Linux never did only deframentation with ext2/3 (despite being inspired by UFS), although it did have an offline e2defrag tool. But yes these designs generally seemed to be much better than FAT under DOS or Windows at avoiding excessive fragmentation.
- ineedasername 5y agoThat would have been a strong reason for me not to use FreeBSD. It's like taking someone who says, "I have a stressful job. The only time I can really relax and feel worry-free is when I'm cooking." And then hiring a personal chef for that person. Sure, the food will taste better, but at what cost? At what cost? (Actually watching defrag stopped being satisfying around the time that I got my first 50GB HDD. It took too damn long to watch, like a 2 year old playing Tetris in slow motion)
- nix23 5y agoOn freebsd you can build/update ports instead of defragmenting your disk.
- bnegreve 5y ago> That would have been a strong reason for me not to use FreeBSD. Well, with this new website, you can now enjoy defraging without having to suffer the consequences of a bad file system.
- josefx 5y agoAnd my disappointment in btrfs when it reminded me of how long it took to defrag a hard drive was limitless. 100 out of 500 GB used, free disk space 0, had to spend an afternoon running rebalance with various parameters to get to a point where it could run a full rebalance without running out of memory. Of course our IT seems to love it since it comes with all possible bells and whistles so I already dread the next time it happens.
- jhoechtl 5y agoIs this anecdotal of some years ago or recent? Are they running a really old kernel? btrfs had this sorts of problems, but some major fixes in this regard have been committed like two years ago.
- wjnc 5y agoThe first bad sector I encountered in the 90s left me shaken for days. We stared eye to eye. The bad sector won. I had broken something my father worked a month for. But it didn't break. The bad sector was marked bad. The computer continued working. I rejoiced.
- pantulis 5y agoI remember the first time Norton Disk Doctor "repaired" a bad disk. Looked like magic to me.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoI’m perpetually kind of bothered that I can’t defragment my ZFS HDD. I’m aware it’s not actually a problem in most cases and it’s not like I’m having performance issues, but it feels like a potential ticking time bomb, albeit one the rational part of me knows will never go off.