Linux is different than Windows when it comes to disk fragmentation, as long as your HDD isn't completely full don't worry about that.
After installing LibreELEC, create a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu live and run Gparted to partition the HDD.
Use the EXT4 disk format when you are going to format the disks, you won't have to worry about defragmentation.
Linux is different than Windows when it comes to disk fragmentation, as long as your HDD isn't completely full don't worry about that.
After installing LibreELEC, create a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu live and run Gparted to partition the HDD.
You should start to defrag the drive as soon as possible. It's because the free space framgentation matter a lot. Here's an example
# e2freefrag /dev/mapper/wd_blue_label
Device: /dev/mapper/wd_blue_label
Blocksize: 4096 bytes
Total blocks: 10485760
Free blocks: 5300574 (50.6%)
Min. free extent: 4 KB
Max. free extent: 102620 KB
Avg. free extent: 764 KB
Num. free extent: 27670
HISTOGRAM OF FREE EXTENT SIZES:
Extent Size Range : Free extents Free Blocks Percent
4K... 8K- : 4999 4999 0.09%
8K... 16K- : 3122 7593 0.14%
16K... 32K- : 2267 11814 0.22%
32K... 64K- : 3904 46218 0.87%
64K... 128K- : 3344 77238 1.46%
128K... 256K- : 1483 67248 1.27%
256K... 512K- : 1557 139753 2.64%
512K... 1024K- : 1893 348821 6.58%
1M... 2M- : 2602 960571 18.12%
2M... 4M- : 1547 1057653 19.95%
4M... 8M- : 579 820353 15.48%
8M... 16M- : 218 580805 10.96%
16M... 32M- : 103 555535 10.48%
32M... 64M- : 44 456989 8.62%
64M... 128M- : 8 164984 3.11%Pay the close attention to:
Avg. free extent: 764 KB
So as you can see, even though the partition is only 50% full, you have thousands of small chunks and just a few big chunks. Try to put in this partition a 1GiB file. How many chunks it will have? Now try to imagine what would happen if you start worrying about fragmentation when the drive was 80%+ full? That's why you should defrag a drive from time to time -- the sooner you start, the better the shape your files will be in.
Use the EXT4 disk format when you are going to format the disks, you won't have to worry about defragmentation.
Where did you get this kind of info?
Where did you get this kind of info?
I just checked the 7 drives in my file server, and the worst fragmentation score I got is 0%. That file server is in use since 2014.
So either I'm incredibly lucky, or perhaps you are doing something wrong.
How did you check the fragmentation score?
Could you post some summary?
The next thing is that I know nothing about your setup, i.e. what's the capacity of the storage, what kind of files you store there, what's the free space percentage, what's the file rotation level.
Another thing is this: why did the developers of the EXT4 filesystem make the tool like e4defrag? If you're right, this tool is useless, so why does someone implement online defrag for filesystem which doesn't get fragmented?
Anyone who uses linux as a main OS knows that files get fragmented with time, and if you don't defrag them, you ultimately find yourself in position I was a few years back, where I had to copy everything to some other drive to deal with really high fragmentation level -- because there was no free contingous space on the drive big enough to defrag any of the files, and the only way to reduce fragmentation lvl was to move the files to some other HDD and copy them back to the original drive with some e4defrag passes from time to time. Since then, I don't have issues with fragmentation on my drives, but files get fragmented and EXT4 file system is no exception.
