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Hacking WBFS defrag

  • Thread starter Thread starter PsyBlade
  • Start date Start date
  • Views Views 11,487
  • Replies Replies 71

Would you like to have a WBFS defrag util?

  • Yes

    Votes: 38 71.7%

  • No

    Votes: 15 28.3%
  • Total voters
    53
Look at it this way:
WBFS / Fat32
Defrag Support - Not needed / Needed and time intensive
Games Per Partition - more than enough / more than enough
Speed: faster / fast
Check disk: very fast (
 
Yes, I'm sure (you must use the right tools). The speed was the main reason to change back to WBFS, fragmentation the second one. (background: I will very often add/replace images because of custom mario kart)


EDIT:

The reason is very simple:
If adding a disc to WBFS, my tools do:
  1. Load management data (some MB) from drive into memory.
  2. Check the integrity (
 
I speak from adding and managing discs at the PC and not from the USB loader speed. And speed is only one point, but will be significant because of fragmentation on heavily used drives.

The main point is: Because some people don't like WBFS drives, the talk about advantages of FAT/NTFS that aren't there. See the example of crwys:
Disadvantage of WBFS = No defragmentation tool. But if you know that WBFS is never fragmented in terms of PC ratios, this argument converts into a great advantage of WBFS.

If oggzee implemented the FAT support, non power and new users start to say "WBFS is obsolete and bad". And for me it's like trolling, because they don't know about WBFS. And every day users come to this thread and post something, and I'm sure they have never read this threads and arguments. That is trolling!

I accept that people use FAT/NTFS for private reasons (easier to handle for the average user), but the other imaginary advantages are most lies to suggest, that the their decision is right.
 
Fragmentation is nothing inherent to fat (or most other fs - with the exception of CoW filesystems) it comes only from the driver (something that can be and was improved a lot since the dos days)

If you only use the drive to store wii images (as you would have with wbfs) it is not going to fragment heavily whatever fs you use.
A file can only ever fragment when writing to it (rare in this case) and its mostly a problem if files regularly grow in size (something wii images never do)
If used in such a manner I even expect fat32 to fragment less compared to wbfs.
Even is other files change size (append - del&create is not a problem) only these files would fragment.

I greatly appreciate you contributions to the wii community wiimm,
but in this case I believe you are the one spreading missinformation
(a lie would implie knowing it is not true, something I think neither side does in this case).

You don't need to hold all relevant metadata in ram to be able to do all metadata changes before or after the write.
But it is possible to do so - wbfs2fat does it because it was easier to implemant and safer to use.
It is not multitreaded either.

Imho fat32 is even less complicated then wbfs.
Filesystem checks are comparative in speed too (at least with fsck.vfat - don't know about other checkers).
Testing wbfs2fat, I did run more of them then I ever wanted to.
 
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Fragmentation will appear, if you add and delete files with different sizes. And all users with FAT only drives tell, that they use games (>1GB) and other files (very often only some KB upto MB) together. If working with such drives and the drive becomes full, fragmentation is there.

I talk only about fragmentation, because the others see a great advantage of FAT because the existence of defragmentation tools. This implies for me, that they have fragmentation problems and that it is important. And with this base all my conclusions are true.
 
I think this is a great idea for anyone that still uses wbfs formatted drives. I was under the impression that this was obsolete. I use fat32 with cfg usb running from a 32GB SD card.
 
impizkit said:
I think this is a great idea for anyone that still uses wbfs formatted drives. I was under the impression that this was obsolete. I use fat32 with cfg usb running from a 32GB SD card.
Click to expand...
Obsolete only because of more recovery options available for FAT32 drives; as Wiimm stated before. I believe it's easier to work with (not quite sure) since some loaders like Mighty Loader only supported it and at the time had no other intention of branching out to support other file systems.

If this does in-fact get released a family member who's Wii I modded still uses WBFS and I will make use of it there.
 
For most people wbfs isn't practical, but I can see why Wiimm would find it useful. If you are constantly deleting and adding files to your HDD, fragmentation would be a big problem on FAT32/NTFS, but few people do that. Most people consider WBFS obsolete because so few people find it useful when compared to FAT32/NTFS.

Most people want to use their HDD for more than just games (different kinds of media, emu nands, homebrew, etc), and FAT32 runs just about everything.
 
In my first post I said, that a defragmentation tool is not needed. Nevertheless I will bring my knowledge and help for this project. What's wrong with this?

--- snip ---

I'm sure that for most users FAT/NTFS is the better choice. But the reasons most people announce are wrong. It's not the technical aspect, it's the usability for the average users. And every time a user says "I'm using WBFS" there are a lot of statements like "WBFS is bad/outdated/poor/slow/waste". You can find such single (trolling/flaming) statements also in this thread. And my fight is against these preconceptions, because they are simply wrong.

--- snip ---

And here a little test:
I have used my WD 500GB USB drive. For each test I have formatted it into the needed format (FAT or WBFS). Then I have copied 13 discs with 18GB total, os = Linux. The results:
Code: 
Linux/FAT:  9m 56s = 596s = 100%
Linux/WBFS: 8m 37s = 517s =  87%
I know that WBFS has very constant writing and reading rates, even it it becomes full (the drive becomes a little bit slower because of the inner cylinders). I sure (but don't know the details) that FAT becomes more slower if nearly full and much slower if fragmented. And that's my reason for going back to WBFS.

--- snip ---

I will now quit this discussion level ...
 
Wiimm said:
I will now quit this discussion level ...
Click to expand...
Oh no, please continue! This thread is hilarious!

On a more serious note, I use ext2 because I realized back ups are not a bad idea, and FUSE has bad ARM support. I like being able to plug the HDD into my NAS and rsync everything.

And don't forget some homebrew, even during normal operation corrupt FAT32 partitions (I'm looking at you HBB...) Not everyone has the time to go to sleep just because they need to check/defrag their drives.
 
@danielko
For a sync try: wwt -a sync BACKUP_DIR --test
The test option enables test mode: Tell what to do, but do nothing. Important to know: times stamps will be used. But only my tools support time stamps in a WBFS archive.
 
air2004 said:
I like WBFS ....... and most people will too ....I have an SD card slot for a reason , thats why I like WBFS
Click to expand...
The only thing I don't like about WBFS is windows always asks me to format... If only I could turn that feature of windows off I would love it LoL (no, really); I don't even have 500 games or anywhere near it.

I would have a seperate partition setup so if something corrupts my hdd all I would have to do is format the the other partition w/o having to worry about losing my games stored on WBFS.
 
kylster said:
The only thing I don't like about WBFS is windows always asks me to format... If only I could turn that feature of windows off I would love it LoL (no, really); I don't even have 500 games or anywhere near it.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure, but I have done this or that long time ago and Windows don't ask any longer: Plug in your drive, open the "drive manager" (in german "Datenträgerverwaltung") and remove the drive letter. Maybe it was an other setting.

Please report if my guess is right.
 

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