Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter

Beautiful.

Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years...

But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.

This is the most useless thing I've seen on here lately. It's not necessary on hard drives, as the page cache did a decent job of improving disk access even in the 90s, let alone with today's fast HDDs. And if you're on an SSD... it'll just burn that out faster.

I love it!

This made me think of https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/, which moves boot files into sequential runs, which was helpful on spinning disks where seeks were slow but sequential reads were fast.

Just as an idea for a feature your defragmenter could have.

(Also this is a side thought; but I wonder if AWS AMIs and EBS volumes will boot faster if also organized sequentially.)

I have a question about disk defragmenter. I've asked a couple of people before and they've said it is not possible but iirc if I stated disk defragmenter and then even so much as moved the mouse after it started it would start with the first boxes again. Do you remember this too?