We also have memory fragmenters to do the same for memory for the same reasons.
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…
Actually here is a recent paper discussing this (although the basic concept is much older):
Now everything is just easier (which is better for most people!) but I miss the old days.
20 years ago if somebody told you they used Linux it really meant something - they weren't running WSL, they weren't running a VM in EC2, they probably didn't power on and immediately have things working, and they probably learned a ton just getting to a login screen for the first time. Spinning up a VM just doesn't give the same learning experience.
So many of us spent so much time staring at the barrel of a particle accelerator.
If you inspect and go to sources and look for "1e3 /" you'll find the line responsible, you can set a breakpoint and change e.disk.iops to 1000 which will make the timeout per row 1s instead of 2-4s, so the whole thing goes faster.
> The HFS Plus file system transparently defragments files that are less than 20 MiB in size and are broken into 8 or more fragments when the file is being opened.
Which I expect would have significantly reduced the need to defrag and thus reduced the joy of computing. :p
afaics all that meant was file allocations make a little extra space at the end, so if the file expands it doesn't need to allocate a new block.
If one keeps files around for a long time and constantly adds to them, then the files get fragmented on any filesystem.
The only way to avoid this is pre-allocate all files to their maximum possible size and never exceed that size.
Source: Watching a disk defrag was every millenial kids equivalent of going to the laundromat and watching laundry tumble.
https://morello.dev/blog/defrag98-rebuild
what it looked like before
https://morello.dev/blog/windows-98-defrag-simulator
a previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962195
here is another version i found when googling these things that seems somewhat similar, but with a few more "accurate" features. also, has the source available in a single file.
https://horatioconkerhead.github.io/win98-defrag/
if you want the real deal, you can run windows 95 in the browser quick. it took running it a few times to get it to actually defrag:
I did it in computer lab and showed others and the teacher lost it, thought we were breaking things.
When I changed it between drives and back I lost my progress :/
Typically it would be getting some bits from other parts of the drive and there would be a few (that many) bits it wouldn't move because they were the swap file and DOS boot system files.
As great as it is, way too fast.
Per-drive individual sounds, and BSoD included. Nice touches, love it!
If AI generated this is what the AI revolution is all about.
Can we get a cross platform screensaver?