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When I was younger, my friends and I joked about making a "Disk Fragmenter" which would enumerate through every file on the disk and split them into non-contigu
by vunderba 18d ago
When I was younger, my friends and I joked about making a "Disk Fragmenter" which would enumerate through every file on the disk and split them into non-contiguous clusters to make sure that the actuator arm on your platter-drive gets a PROPER WORKOUT TO FEEL THE BURN.
- leoooodias 18d agoLOL
- andikleen2 18d agoSuch tools really exist and they're used for testing file systems, so that you have a more realistic "aged" layout on a freshly created test file systems. We also have memory fragmenters to do the same for memory for the same reasons.
- rbanffy 18d agoOn CoW systems, file and block deduplication and writes to the middle of a file will do that for you.
- alwa 18d agoWould those tools be primarily proprietary, or do some live in the open-source world too? I’d be interested in the techniques they use to aim for realism there. Admittedly I haven’t made much of a search, but various search engines and autocorrects seem really convinced that I mean “defragmenter” instead of “fragmenter,” despite myself…
- andikleen2 18d agoIt's usually custom scripts, I'm not aware of a standard tool. You fill up the file system and then do lots of operations that cause fragmentation. Actually here is a recent paper discussing this (although the basic concept is much older): https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08858 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08858
- edoceo 18d agoArch Linux Wiki on stress testing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Stress_testing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Stress_testing
- walrus01 18d agoThis makes me wonder at the absurdity (yet plausible implementation??!?!) of a tool to test something like ZFS filesystem limits, as they are quite gargantuan in many possible measures.