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.

I like the graphical interface and the movement of the blocks. Brings back memories of defragmenting hard drives once a month and seeing noticeable performance improvements sometimes.

> Fragmentation and extent allocation were adding measurable variance, even on NVMe,

Why exactly would there be a measurable variance on NVMe? I understand there could be some impact on magnetic hard drives. This sounds like some sort of coincidence due to other factors and that this defragmentation won’t achieve much (except for wearing out your SSD even faster in certain cases).

This cool, but can we get an option to emulate HDD noises please? I really miss the whirrs, clicks and creaks. And the little LED that indicated disk activity... but that'd be a separate project.

As long as we keep trying to bring windows mainstream shit for penguins, I am happy with that. Btw I am building similar tools for linux hahaha.

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.)

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!

So now we are using vibe coded disk fragmenters that actually touch the disk state on your machine. It has little to no tests.

Now HNers here don't even question the soundness of this software and just assume it works as it was suspiciously built in 4 days.

One side-effect of the AI mania is that developers have lost the ability to reason around the verification stage of vibe coded software.

Oh dear.

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?