Ubuntu

karmik, no contiguos space on ext4 partition

Asked by smurf

I have an EXT4 partition with all my music, so the files are all between 3 and 10 MB, When I migrated to Karmic I saved all the data on an external usb disk and reformatted that partition. Then I transferred alla data from USB disk to that partition.
The partition is the only one present on a Samsung 250GB HDD SATA and is all disk size large. After that I found a 80 % no coniguous space.
Thinking to some issue in kernel (i installed the alpha5 and then I updated daily KK, with many kernels updates), today I tried to move again all data and reformatting the partition, but after restored all data my HDD is like this

musica: 25754/15269888 files (82.1% no contiguos), 34209743/61049000 blocks

is it normal?
can produce any performance problem?

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Thomas Krüger
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Best Thomas Krüger (thkrueger) said : 		#1

Fragmented file systems on magnetic hard drives (not SSDs) are decreasing the I/O performance that's true.
But do not compare that to experiences you may have made with Windows. If the Windows defrag tool tells you something about 80% fragmentation your disk is pretty messed up. On ext4 the percentages are calculated differently and 82% are normal for many big files. And ext4 is far better in handling fragmentation than Windows file systems.

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smurf (luca-dgh) said : 		#2

Thanks Thomas Krüger, that solved my question.