4 ms·

That 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

That 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 ago
On freebsd you can build/update ports instead of defragmenting your disk.
- mnd999 5y ago
  gtk3-webkit got updated again? There goes my day.
  - nix23 5y ago
    haha...true, time to fire up all the distcc machines ;)
  - anthk 5y ago
    No ccache?
- mavhc 5y ago
  And then spend hours fixing the system, which I guess is like if the defragmenter corrupted your files
  - nix23 5y ago
    Never had that problem....not since years at least.
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.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Yeah, but it's like a gambling addiction. If there are no stakes, no risk of loss? ... ... It takes the heart out of it. It's just not the same. Maybe I should just defrag my SSD's these days. Sure they don't need it's but it's fast and bad for the drive, which gives it that same thrill of gambling with the integrity of my data. Of course I'd need to disable cloud backups to backblaze and local backups to a raid array, but if I try then I think I can still chase the thrill of the 'frag.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    SSDs don't need to get defragged, but it needs occasional trimming, and that can be done either continuously, or batched. Sadly, there's no fancy graphical application to show you what was trimmed in the batched version. If you use a filesystem with checksums, you can also scrub it. The stakes are there: is my data bit rotted? Will the errors resist recovery? It also takes about the same time as the defrag, but again I don't know of any graphical tools.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    Make a 'defrag monkey' script. Take a random file, read it into the RAM, delete the source file, write it back.
- chasil 5y ago
  I think that I'm happy with: xfs_fsr -v
causi 5y ago
I've noticed that myself, that capacity increased much faster than throughput. It would be interesting to see this graphed over time.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  The number of tracks per platter increased, but the RPM didn't. Assuming the heads can only read one track at a time per platter, it will take (number of tracks per platter / rpm) minutes to read the whole disk. Therefore it will take longer to read the whole disk. QED
  - bcrl 5y ago
    Drives don't read from multiple platters in parallel, so it's actually num_tracks * num_platters * 2 / rpm to read in the best case. Real world is more than that since it takes time for the drive firmware to shift between different platters and tracks. *edit: not entirely true: the Seagate MACH.2 drive series that has 2 separate head assemblies per drive. They're pretty expensive and hard to get ahold of.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
boy. i remember moving to xp and a visible disappointment after finding out it didn't have defrag like 98se did.
ChoGGi 5y ago
You could always make a ramdisk and defrag that.
anthk 5y ago
With Linux and BSD I stopped gaming on AAA titles and I went full indie long ago. Even "worse", now I an translating some English text adventures into Spanish. And by playing them OFC. Today I have more fun doing actual projects (programming, writting, playing with teleco stuff) than badly simulating then in video games. With DOS/Windows you simulated a life on games. With Linux, you made it real. Seriously. Slackware it's still a "game changer. You don't play Cyberpunk 2077 if you want, you can make it real life. I do that with the PocketCHIP, Gopher and text gaming/roguelikes/MUDs up into a mountain at night. Incredible experience. Or better, listening to the ISS with a WebSDR and decoding SSTV images with QSSTV. That's the ultimate cyberpunk experience.
justsomehnguy 5y ago
> defrag stopped being satisfying around the time that I got my first 50GB HDD In the rare circumstances when I was in need of actual defrag of a heavily polluted drive > 40Gb I opted to take a filesystem aware image with Norton/Symantec Ghost and just re-image it back. Worked fine and by the time of 100-200Gb drives there were a USB HDDs so I wouldn't even need to unscrew the PC case.

nix23 5y ago

On freebsd you can build/update ports instead of defragmenting your disk.

mnd999 5y ago
gtk3-webkit got updated again? There goes my day.
- nix23 5y ago
  haha...true, time to fire up all the distcc machines ;)
- anthk 5y ago
  No ccache?
mavhc 5y ago
And then spend hours fixing the system, which I guess is like if the defragmenter corrupted your files
- nix23 5y ago
  Never had that problem....not since years at least.

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.

ineedasername 5y ago
Yeah, but it's like a gambling addiction. If there are no stakes, no risk of loss? ... ... It takes the heart out of it. It's just not the same. Maybe I should just defrag my SSD's these days. Sure they don't need it's but it's fast and bad for the drive, which gives it that same thrill of gambling with the integrity of my data. Of course I'd need to disable cloud backups to backblaze and local backups to a raid array, but if I try then I think I can still chase the thrill of the 'frag.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  SSDs don't need to get defragged, but it needs occasional trimming, and that can be done either continuously, or batched. Sadly, there's no fancy graphical application to show you what was trimmed in the batched version. If you use a filesystem with checksums, you can also scrub it. The stakes are there: is my data bit rotted? Will the errors resist recovery? It also takes about the same time as the defrag, but again I don't know of any graphical tools.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  Make a 'defrag monkey' script. Take a random file, read it into the RAM, delete the source file, write it back.
chasil 5y ago
I think that I'm happy with: xfs_fsr -v

causi 5y ago

I've noticed that myself, that capacity increased much faster than throughput. It would be interesting to see this graphed over time.

HPsquared 5y ago
The number of tracks per platter increased, but the RPM didn't. Assuming the heads can only read one track at a time per platter, it will take (number of tracks per platter / rpm) minutes to read the whole disk. Therefore it will take longer to read the whole disk. QED
- bcrl 5y ago
  Drives don't read from multiple platters in parallel, so it's actually num_tracks * num_platters * 2 / rpm to read in the best case. Real world is more than that since it takes time for the drive firmware to shift between different platters and tracks. *edit: not entirely true: the Seagate MACH.2 drive series that has 2 separate head assemblies per drive. They're pretty expensive and hard to get ahold of.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

boy. i remember moving to xp and a visible disappointment after finding out it didn't have defrag like 98se did.

ChoGGi 5y ago

You could always make a ramdisk and defrag that.

anthk 5y ago

With Linux and BSD I stopped gaming on AAA titles and I went full indie long ago. Even "worse", now I an translating some English text adventures into Spanish. And by playing them OFC. Today I have more fun doing actual projects (programming, writting, playing with teleco stuff) than badly simulating then in video games. With DOS/Windows you simulated a life on games. With Linux, you made it real. Seriously. Slackware it's still a "game changer. You don't play Cyberpunk 2077 if you want, you can make it real life. I do that with the PocketCHIP, Gopher and text gaming/roguelikes/MUDs up into a mountain at night. Incredible experience. Or better, listening to the ISS with a WebSDR and decoding SSTV images with QSSTV. That's the ultimate cyberpunk experience.

justsomehnguy 5y ago

> defrag stopped being satisfying around the time that I got my first 50GB HDD In the rare circumstances when I was in need of actual defrag of a heavily polluted drive > 40Gb I opted to take a filesystem aware image with Norton/Symantec Ghost and just re-image it back. Worked fine and by the time of 100-200Gb drives there were a USB HDDs so I wouldn't even need to unscrew the PC case.