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Does moving a file/folder causes fragmentation in Disk on Ubuntu 20.04?

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In this article on Quora 'Does disk fragmentation occur in Linux? If not, why?' it explains that Linux (EXT4) does not fragment any disk. Windows however will (FAT 32/NTFS).

Fragmentation only happens on HDDs (the ones with platters and readheads in them).So you can defrag them once in a while for better performance.

Fragmentation does not happen on SSDs. Don't perform a defragmentation on these kind of disks. It is useless and the read/writes shorten its lifespan.

So it really depends on what kind of disk(s) you have in your system and what filesystem you use.

user68186
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Joepie Es
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  • NVMes are a specific kind of controller interface for Solid State Drives (SSDs). The other kind of controller interface for SSDs and HDDs are called SATA. There is nothing called SDD. – user68186 Mar 01 '22 at 14:50
  • @user68186 Thanks for editing my answer. And youŕe right about the controllers SATA and NVME. – Joepie Es Mar 01 '22 at 15:47
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moving a file with the mv command on the same disk does not move data. It changes only the directory entries relating to this data. Hence, it cannot fragment a disk.

Bruni
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    Moving within same partition / filesystem does not move data physically. Moving between partitions / filesystems does !! – Soren A Mar 01 '22 at 15:12
  • @SorenA Thank you. I am well aware of thatm, but will clarify. Moving between partitions is a smaller problem with regard to fragmentation in any case...Oh I just saw, I already had mentioned it (...I write on the same disk) – Bruni Mar 01 '22 at 15:16
  • You are wrong. Why are moving between partitions on same disks a smaller problem than movin between disk in relation to fragmentation ? – Soren A Mar 01 '22 at 15:18
  • @SorenA You are right on this. I made a logical mistake on this. The answer is correct though, even if not complete. – Bruni Mar 01 '22 at 15:22
  • Thanks everyone for information. I'm new to Linux and Ubuntu. I want to know whether drag-and-dropping a file/folder works in a similar way (does it only changes the directory entries) as using mv command does. –  Mar 01 '22 at 15:58
  • @ByteManager I am not sure about drag and drop (it is not in my workflow). Cut and paste on the same partition works like move (at least on KDE) – Bruni Mar 02 '22 at 07:27