[Gllug] ntfs defrag

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 09:34:14AM +0000, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 08:54:18AM +0000, Avi wrote:
> > Lucy Peters wrote:
> > > I have a ntfs partition for my data files. I know Windows xp has a 
> > > program to de-fragment the ntfs drive in order to improve the speed of 
> > > accessing the data to the disk. Are there a similar program in linux to 
> > > provide such data maintenance for the disk?
> > 
> > An NTFS defragger is slated to be part of ntfsprogs, but it's not 
> > actually there yet:
> > http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsdefrag
> 
> Writing to, as opposed to reading from, NTFS partitions under Linux has
> always been considered risky.  Since the only circumstances under which
> most people would be mounting NTFS on Linux would be a dual-boot system,
> why increase the risk when there's another OS on the computer that can
> perform the task safely?

I'm not quite sure what the big issue is with writing to NTFS.  The
format is strange, but sane (speaking as someone who reverse
engineered it to write 'virt-df').  If the Linux kernel NTFS driver
corrupts the disk, that's an issue with the kernel programmers being
incompetent, not with NTFS or some Big Bad MS Secret in the format
itself.  I notice the FUSE/userspace NTFS driver can read and write to
NTFS just fine ..

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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