Such tools really exist and they're used for testing file systems, so that you have a more realistic "aged" layout on a freshly created test file systems.

We also have memory fragmenters to do the same for memory for the same reasons.

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alwa a day ago | parent | next [-]

Would those tools be primarily proprietary, or do some live in the open-source world too? I’d be interested in the techniques they use to aim for realism there.

Admittedly I haven’t made much of a search, but various search engines and autocorrects seem really convinced that I mean “defragmenter” instead of “fragmenter,” despite myself…

	▲	andikleen2 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's usually custom scripts, I'm not aware of a standard tool. You fill up the file system and then do lots of operations that cause fragmentation. Actually here is a recent paper discussing this (although the basic concept is much older): https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08858
	▲	edoceo a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Arch Linux Wiki on stress testing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Stress_testing

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walrus01 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This makes me wonder at the absurdity (yet plausible implementation??!?!) of a tool to test something like ZFS filesystem limits, as they are quite gargantuan in many possible measures.

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rbanffy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

On CoW systems, file and block deduplication and writes to the middle of a file will do that for you.