[TriLUG] HDD Maintenance

[James LewisMoss]

>>>>> On Sat, 27 Apr 2002 21:00:34 -0400, John Warf <jwarf at chatham.k12.nc.us> said:

 John> I don't know of one like defrag but I use "fsck" for scandisk
 John> on a normal basis.  If anyone knows of a good one to download
 John> off the net please let me know.

Most (all?) filesystems used on a linux system (ext2 and by relation
ext3, reiserfs) don't need to be defragmented.

fsck should be run at every boot (if it isn't then your distro is
really screwed up).  It may say the fs is clean and do nothing.  This
means the filesystem was cleanly unmounted before the computer
shutdown (and is thence in a consistent state and doesn't need to be
checked).  The ext2 filesystem will be checked every n reboots anyway
(even if it's "clean").

You can use the tune2fs program to change parameters on an ext2
filesystem (ext3 as well I believe in fact you can use it to turn an
ext2 filesystem into an ext3 filesystem by adding a journal to it).

Be careful with tune2fs though.  It can do bad things.  Check out the
e2fsprogs package (name on debian not sure what it is on other
systems, but it should be similar) for other binaries.  But really you
shouldn't have any need to do anything after you make the filesystem.

hdparm as suggested by someone else is good to turn on the faster
transfer modes of some ide drive/chip combinations.  Again be
careful. :)  You can do bad things with this.

HTH
Jim

-- 
@James LewisMoss <dres at debian.org>      |  Blessed Be!
@    http://jimdres.home.mindspring.com |  Linux is kewl!
@"Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." Bach