Is it possible to Defrag and partition HDD's via LibreELEC

1st Official Post

    Hi

    Have a new blank system. LibreELEC will be installed . I will have 2 HDD's and want to partition one of them for system and Music library. The second will be for videos, I have a great number of vidoes and the turn over is quite high so at the moment I defrag the drive fairly regularly, but can find no way to do this on LibreELEC.

    New system is Intel x64 based and will be standalone.

    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.

    Edited once, last by vitorp07 (February 21, 2017 at 3:48 PM).

    Thanks for that.

    I guessed it would be Gparted but was not sure about how to access. Had not thought of USB Stick.

    First Mobo I got proved to be faulty so am waiting for replacement then away we go. Finally a lovely fast dedicated media server.

    Thanks again.:)

    Quote from vitorp07

    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

    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.

    Quote from Klojum

    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?

    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.