I’ve been scrounging around the Internet in recent days, looking for an animal that might not exist: an NTFS defragmenter for Linux.

I had a flashback the other day to an early experience with Ubuntu, when I wanted to defragment an external hard drive that had been set up in Windows. This was earlier in the days of ntfs3g, when it wasn’t generally considered stable, and the last I heard was that it was unlikely to get a defragmenter for a while.

I was reminded of that a day ago, and went looking again to see if anyone had written such a program yet. As best I can tell, it still doesn’t exist. Please correct me if I’m wrong; you’ll be doing me a favor.

In the mean time, I suppose (with heavy emphasis on the word “suppose”) it could be possible to set up Wine to run the in-house defragmenter common to XP or another version of Windows, and get the job done that way. It seems like a circuitous route just to knock down the defragmentation on a drive though.

I shall search a little more and experiment some too, and see what I can come up with.