Why “defrag” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
When I started Linux in the 90s, I remember looking for defrag utilities and finding none, but reading that defragging wasn't really necessary under ext2, because the page cache…
by bitwize · Aug 30, 2026
You should see Norton Speed Disk for Windows defrag a DriveSpace volume! It's two step process.
by M95D · Aug 30, 2026
My observation is that it is not completely true. I constantly have a close to full partition in ext4 and there is no secrets when there is no space the filesystem WILL create a…
by gbin · Aug 30, 2026
Wikipedia claims [1]: > The HFS Plus file system transparently defragments files that are less than 20 MiB in size and are broken into 8 or more fragments when the file is being…
by toast0 · Aug 30, 2026
Except most SSD also don't store pages sequentially internally (hidden flash wear leveling is even in microsd cards now), and the dram/SLC buffer areas are finite especiall…
by Joel_Mckay · Aug 30, 2026
Maybe my memory is bad, but I recall defrag taking hours to complete.
by alberth · Aug 30, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "defrag" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "defrag" over time.
In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the degree of fragmentation, files that are stored in multiple segments that are not contiguous on the storage medium. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Read more on Wikipedia