[Tfug] Defrag a disk

[Jim March]

Well few people need to shoot files bigger than 32gig around, and
Fat32 works acceptably well to that point.

Second, because Fat32 is what's in USB flash memory, cameras and the
like, it's become the one disk type *everybody* supports natively.
Linux (almost all recent distros and kernel versions), Mac and Windows
can all read/write it with zero tweaking.  I keep a 32gig Fat32
partition on my external 160gig USB drive for exactly this reason, so
that I have disk space that I know *everybody* can read/write.

Is it the most efficient?  Hell no.  But it works as a "universal
translator" format.

Jim

On 9/10/07, Rich <r-lists at studiosprocket.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 10, 2007, at 3:09 pm, Jim March wrote:
>
> > but XFS and I *think* JFS can get fragmented.
> Yep. XFS is the best filesystem I've used, and fragmentation has
> never been a problem for me. If it was:
> http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/index.php/XFS_defragmentation
>
> With JFS, it seems the free-space fragmentation is the issue:
> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?
> topic=/com.ibm.aix.baseadmn/doc/baseadmndita/jfsfreespace.htm
>
> > Then again...if you're new enough to be asking this question, you
> > should be using Ext3 for your primary Linux partition, plus a swap
> > partition (it's a special type of it's own) plus small Fat32
> > partitions to do transfers with Windows/Mac users and NTFS for
> > anything Windows2000/XP/Vista will be accessing.
>
> Hm. First, what happens when you want to transfer *big* files on
> those small FAT32 partitions? And second, what's wrong with dumping
> FAT32 entirely and *supporting* NTFS? Linux and Mac can both use
> FUSE. Anyway, this is OT, (by which I don't mean "On Topic", or
> "Operating Thetan").
>
> R.
>
>
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