The content of this topic has been archived on 2 May 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.
I am running Openwrt on a WL160NL router.
When the attached USB HDD is getting full, the transfer speed between the computer and router hdd drops to 200kb/s - mostly on the most recent files.
I figure that this is because of fragmentation - though transfer speed is 200kb or lower, hdd activity is very intense.
Is there a package I can use for defragmentation? How can I defrag the drive? (it is ext3 format)
I thought all EXT filesystems come with a defragmentation utility that kicks in automatically.
Do they? I am not sure then - my transfer speed drops dramatically when hdd approaches full space usage, and it is slower when transferring the last files that were copied. To me this is a sign of fragmentation...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Defragmentation
It sais that: "nonetheless ext3 filesystems can get fragmented over time or on specific usage patterns, like slowly-writing large files"
This is my case, I am storing 720p movies that are written by transmission - max speed 1MB/s, but usually slower...
ext4's extents I think were made to help somewhat, but even that doesn't make it immune. Also, ReiserFS, btrfs and several other filesystems support block suballocation/tail packing that cuts down on fragmentation even more.
The discussion might have continued from here.