How to defragment the SSD on linux

hard-diskperformancessd

This page demonstrates that defragmentation is beneficial for SSDs. I suppose this type of defragmentation has to be trim-aware, so as to preserve the life time of the disk.
How can I do that on linux?

EDIT: Comments pointed out that this article's content is questionable.

Best Answer

In general you can just ignore fragmentation altogether. More so for SSD which do not suffer from seek times like HDD. Defragmenting a SSD will do nothing except waste write cycles.

Although there may be extreme cases where fragmentation has a noticable effect, such as a sparse file written to in random order (as some BitTorrent clients do), or when the disk runs out of free space, when the last file that was written to will be split up in thousands of fragments as there was no other consecutive space available to fit the needs.

But that's the exception. It doesn't happen usually. Most filesystems are very good at avoiding fragmentation, and the Linux kernel is good at avoiding ill effects caused by fragmentation. Once more than one process read/write files concurrently, the disk will have to be everywhere at once anyway.

There aren't too many defragmentation solutions for Linux. XFS has xfs_fsr which works great, so if you absolutely want to use defragmentation, XFS is a good choice.

You can check file fragmentation using filefrag or hdparm:

# filefrag debian-6.0.6-amd64-netinst.iso 
debian-6.0.6-amd64-netinst.iso: 4 extents found

# hdparm --fibmap debian-6.0.6-amd64-netinst.iso

debian-6.0.6-amd64-netinst.iso:
 filesystem blocksize 4096, begins at LBA 0; assuming 512 byte sectors.
 byte_offset  begin_LBA    end_LBA    sectors
           0    3003928    3072407      68480
    35061760    2872856    2938391      65536
    68616192    2171576    2302647     131072
   135725056   56259072   56338047      78976

If that doesn't give you hundreds or thousands of extents (fragments), it's nothing to worry about.

A generic defragmentation method is to make a copy of the file and then replace the original with it, such as:

cp -a yourfile yourfile.defrag
mv yourfile.defrag yourfile

Your filesystem should have a good amount of free space as otherwise the probability is high that the new file will just be as fragmented as the old one. (Check if the new file is better than the old one before replacing).

But as I said, there is usually no need to do this unless a file got a really bad case of fragmentation somehow.

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