Comment by bitwize

When I started Linux in the 90s, I remember looking for defrag utilities and finding none, but reading that defragging wasn't really necessary under ext2, because the page cache smoothed things out and/or the fs was to some degree self-maintaining. The same with NTFS. DOS file systems needed regular defragging, of course, because they were kind of garbo anyway. But coming across a real filesystem blew my mind at the time.