EXT4 basically takes care of itself. Defragmentation is only a problem when lots of small and medium sized files are splattered all over a drive. Whenever you put large files (like videos) onto a HDD for storage, the amount of defragmentation is negligible.
Here is a YT video explaining how you can check (and defrag if necessary) a HDD:
EXT4 basically takes care of itself. Defragmentation is only a problem when lots of small and medium sized files are splattered all over a drive. Whenever you put large files (like videos) onto a HDD for storage, the amount of defragmentation is negligible.
Here is a YT video explaining how you can check (and defrag if necessary) a HDD:
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That's actually not true. When you have a storage HDD and you put some big files in there, then the big files can easily get fragmented. I recently moved my entire movie collection to a new 2T drive. When I placed 2GiB file on the empty drive, the file already had bunch of chunks. After running manually e4defrag, the file had 1 chunk. Now, when you place multiple big files, they all will get fragmented and the more files you add, the more fragments you get with each newly copied file. 20-30 fragments for a 2 GiB file isn't a big thing, but if you don't defrag the HDD, and you start to remove some files and add new ones, they easily get 1K-10K fragments, and then it becomes a problem. So when I was moving the movie collection, I copied 300G, then 10 passed of e4defrag, then I copied another 300G, and another 10 passed of e4defrag, and so on. Whenever I copy some movies to the drive (or delete them), I run one or two passed of e4defrag to keep the fragmentation level at minimum. I've once had a situation where files on my drive were in really bad shape 10-100K chunks for 1GiB files, but that was before I knew how things work. So basically defrag the drive once in a while.
